I keep seeing gif sets for Outlander going past my dash and getting excited to see Sam Heughan in a kilt again (the man has excellent legs and I am weak, weak, trash) and then I saw a picture of Diana Gabaldon and had this weird transportive memory moment where suddenly I am 18 years old again working in the tea house on Sauchiehall Street and I’m taking the order of this really polite American couple who keep telling me about all the tourist things they have done here and asking me if I have been up to Inverness and visited XYZ. And I’m just there for the tip man, Americans tip so good I am just giving it my all, laughing along and chattering away, I’m one step away from doing a jig for them if it will get me a tenner I can keep to myself.
And then the husband goes off somewhere, and it’s just the dark haired lady sitting up by the window seat watching the Glasgow world go by, and I refill her cup several more times and talk her into trying the freshly baked shortbread and soon she’s my only table left and I’m just sort of lingering nearby polishing cutlery. And then this dark haired woman with bright eyes turns to me and says “you said you’re going to college for literature, right?”
I confirm, yes, that is what I said, but then for some reason I say “I figure I should try and teach or something. There’s not much stable work for writers.”
And there’s this frozen in time moment where she turns to me and says “oh you’re a writer? what do you write?” and 18 -year-old me only has half-baked ideas and is too embarrassed to say, so I just sort of shrug and say “nothing yet, some sci fi I suppose…” and then I get asked “have you read a book series called Outlander?”
It’s only my customer service facade that saves me, because yes, I had read Outlander, everyone and their nan, has read some of Outlander, because everyone and their nan wants to commit several types of sin with Jamie Fraser but other than that I think the book is awful. It was like the Fifty Shades of Grey of its time but without the stalking and the psychosis. So I say, “yea, I’ve read it” and she sort of half laughs and says “You don’t sound that enthused.” and I sort of shrug and say “it was all right, it waffled a bit for me. You can tell the author has never been to Scotland either.”
And on the conversation goes for several more moments before this lady turns the conversation back to what I want to write and I admit I really don’t know but I just want to write eventually and she smiles and nods and then she hands me a business card along with my ten pound tip and tells me “when you’re published let me know” while I smile, nod and glance briefly at the card—remembering vaguely the name Watkins and an address in Arizona—then move on with my life.
Until this very moment in time, over a decade later, I am sat frozen on my couch watching this dark haired woman speak about how she came to write Outlander, and then an image of her husband comes up and I’m just like no, no, no so I look up her website and his last name is Watkins and they live in Arizona guys…guys I’m not 100% sure, but I think past me might have told Diana Gabaldon her book was shit.
I love seeing grown humans setting about little creative tasks out of boredom and then looking quietly pleased with themselves, like maybe a middle-aged woman on her train home from work manages to make a tower out of empty coffee creamers and gazes at it proudly for a few seconds.
I love seeing other people make the overblown OOPS I FORGOT SOMETHING performance for no-one that most of us do when we have to turn around in the middle of the pavement.
I love seeing stony-faced people in queues unable to contain a smile when a baby looking over its mother’s shoulder in front of them locks eyes and does that astonished stare.
– when someone is standing in line and they don’t quite dance to the music playing, but you can SEE their head bop and them mouthing the words
– when someone thinks no one’s paying attention and they sing-talk themselves thru a task
– when they laugh or try to hide a laugh when looking at their phone
– when someone does the thing where they enter another space (such as a supermarket aisle) striding with total purpose, then suddenly forget what they’re doing/looking for, and stop there looking blank for a millisecond while they reboot.
– when people are looking for scissors, in their home or in a store, and they make the scissors gesture with their non-dominant hand as an aid to remind them what they’re doing.
– when automatic social interactions glitch, like when you tell a waiter that you hope he enjoys his food too, or tell the stranger on the phone that you love them.
– the hand gesture people make when they’re thinking at their computer, not typing, and their elbow rests on the table, and they feel the edge of their fingernail with their thumb. This is such a lovely little gesture and to my knowledge I have never seen it in fiction. You’d think it would come up all the time in fic.
– when you’re sharing an experience with a complete stranger (like watching a seagull throw up in public, or waiting for a late train) and you make eye contact, and some comment to each other, and then you guys are, like, ALLIES now. Like you would willingly ride to war to save them. You can’t make eye contact again, but you are very aware of them.
– just evidence of other people’s rich, baffling and complex inner lives.
i love watching couples or friends walking in tandem. i love seeing when they make each other laugh
This is what Hozier means when he says ‘I fall in love just a little bit everyday with someone new.’
This this this^^^^^!!!!!!!
This is the kind of shit you need to look for if you’re in want of a romanticized existence.
I was attempting to add maple syrup themed things to my amazon wishlist because people are practically yelling at me in my inbox to add food stuff to my wishlist that I can eat and I found this gem and I am honestly losing my mind:
It’s a classic [City Slicker Girl] with [fancy glamorous but stressful job] is forced into [Rural Environment By Circumstances Outwith Her Control] where she meets [Rugged Rural Area Man Who Juts Wants To:] *spins wheel* “build barns and make maple syrup and be left alone to raise his coyote in peace”, formula right there and honestly I am HERE FOR IT
Oh god it isn’t properly formatted for ebook, why have the maple gods forsaken me.
{Edit} The main dude’s name is Rick Stannard, he’s a rugged manly man with loner tendencies, a pet coyote he rescued from the woods (pretty sure they belong out there bud) who builds barns with his bare hands and harvests maple syrup for his Aunt Joy’s maple themed store. Aunt Joy is of course, an absolute sass factory. I did not expect to be making a cameo in this book, but there you have it.
It’s also been implied that Rick has medical PTSD so even if he turns out to be a total walnut I’m still going to defend him. He is my nephew after all. He’s also a dumbass who just tripped in the snow by attempting to run in his snow shoes, sprained his ankle, blacked out and nearly froze to death while his pet coyote looked on contemplating the merits of going full feral.
Our main city slicker gal is named Lily Hindsdale and she’s super pissed her grandma died and she has to leave her swanky city slicker job to go to “the wilderness” (aka, Vermont) to take care of her grandmother’s estate. She’s giving off serious corporate villain vibes atm, as she plans to sell her grandma’s land to the resort building company she works for, and “bring civilization to these backward living people”. She may yet have some redeemable qualities but I’ve yet to ascertain any. Frankly I’m hoping the coyote eats her.
Update: Lily has no redeemable qualities.
Just in case any of you were doubting that Aunt Joy is actually me.
[edit]
Okay so Lily also has PTSD related to being in the wilderness. I think she got mauled by a bear or something as a child but we don’t know yet.
Rick is also a poor patient and keeps trying to walk on his busted foot. He’s also dazzled by shiny looking women who look like “they belong in make up commercials” and suffers from “meandering laundry list of descriptor syndrome”
You guys, she’s not like other girls, she’s not one of the wild folk like his rugged Vermont cave people, she’s elegant and refined. With skin. We know this because she’s wearing a cream-colored scarf. Also that’s an odd phrasing I can’t get over, “hung to her thighs”, it’s like the author tried to avoid the cliche trope of describing something as “clung to her thighs” and my brain is just…not parsing it. Hung, hung to her thighs. Surely “skimmed” is a better descriptor? “that skimmed her thighs”.
Actually now that I look at it this whole sequence is out of order.
He starts at her face, goes to her legs, then to her coat, and then her scarf? When surely his gaze could just have easily skipped over her taking in detai—you know what fuck it I’ll just rewrite it:
“A woman stood impatiently in the doorway, brushing the curls of her strawberry blonde hair away from her face as she waited impatiently to be let in. She was not one of the locals who frequented the store—Rick felt certain he would have remembered a face like hers, with her glowing warm tan and piercing blue-green eyes. She certainly wasn’t dressed like someone prepared to brave the Vermont winter, but he couldn’t help but let his gaze linger on the cut of her rust colored dress coat, the fabric hugging her figure and skimming just short of her thighs to reveal long shapely legs clad in skinny black jeans and designer boots better suited to the runway than the mud and snow. She was like no one he’d seen. Not since he’d left New York.”
Like, I mean, I know I’m just a lowly smut peddler who does this for a living and all that, but if the most fascinating thing about the beautiful woman standing unexpectedly on your doorstep is the cream-colored scarf she’s wearing
Or maybe he just has a scarf fetish, who knows. I’d be down with that.
Okay so he invited her in and she’s not sat down three seconds before she insulted his entire home, his business and his way of life and told him she wants to buy up all his land to make a tacky hotel resort and bring some “class” to Vermont and my hard headed fictional nephew did the only plausible thing. He’s going to let the coyote eat her.
Wow great book everyone, so glad it just ends there and there isn’t 300 more pages of this. Yep. Yep.
I’ll say this much, at least the author is aware that her main character is a completely unlikable corporate shill and seems to have an intentional sense of humor about it lmao.
Anyway, I’m off to bed, see you all in the morning when I will likely look at my life choices and still decide to keep reading this sticky maple mess cause gosh darn it, I want to know where the pancakes feature in all of this.
“You’re the best friend that I ever had I’ve been with you such a long time You’re my sunshine and I want you to know That my feelings are true I really love you Oh, you’re my best friend”
crowley after six thousand years has all this patience and all this ‘your pace, angel’ about him and he never says but it’s not out of his own self-preservation vis-a-vis the mortifying ordeal of being known (tho it is vis-a-vis his safety from hell, which we’ve seen he’s willing to risk for aziraphale’s sake – that’s another post). he does it for aziraphale’s. crowley is ready to be known, but he knows that aziraphale – with his faith, with his loyalties to heaven – isn’t ready to know.
in a sense, crowley keeping quiet about the specifics of his feelings for aziraphale is another protective move in a long line of protective moves. crowley’s silence protects aziraphale’s status quo with regards to right and wrong v Right and Wrong as heaven denotes it, and instead crowley allows aziraphale the time and space to work up to challenging it himself. crowley lets aziraphale do it himself, he lets aziraphale come to those conclusions himself. and aziraphale does do this work! just very slowly. he agrees to the arrangement. he understands that he and crowley are in something that both heaven and hell would disapprove of. he doesn’t want crowley to be able to destroy himself, and then he decides he trusts crowley enough to not destroy himself (thereby leaving aziraphale behind). he gets involved in the raising-warlock scheme and doesn’t disclose every part of it to heaven. he goes slow – crowley sees that.
crowley allows him that. if the world weren’t ending, crowley would’ve waited even longer. but aziraphale is still clinging to heaven – he hasn’t given up on that blind faith. he still wants heaven to be good. he’s giving heaven every chance to prove itself as good so he doesn’t have to upset that status quo.
which is why it all blows up when crowley says he wants them to run off together. crowley can’t give aziraphale any more time; there is no more time. crowley submits himself to the mortifying ordeal of being known in a last desperate attempt to get the reward of being loved, but aziraphale isn’t ready to realign his worldview yet. he isn’t ready to acknowledge all the things about heaven and about crowley that must be true for what crowley is saying to be true. aziraphale is in fact flat out startled, and because he isn’t ready, he lashes out and rejects it. and actually, aziraphale in a very real sense has already betrayed crowley – he knows where the antichrist is and he’s already told heaven, and he’s lied to crowley about it. even though aziraphale wants heaven to do the same thing crowley wants – which is to stop the antichrist and the coming armageddon – he is keeping crowley out of it. he’s already put all his eggs in heaven’s basket, and then crowley shows up and submits himself, wholly and completely, to the mortifying ordeal of being known, and aziraphale basically goes, what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what am I supposed to do with that. it’s no mistake that crowley’s unforgivability v aziraphale’s holiness is a part of the arc in this conversation – aziraphale is thinking about it, and crowley is deliberately telling him, you know me better than to define me by that. but how can crowley be right over heaven? only if heaven is wrong. aziraphale can’t let go of that, not yet.
and for the first time really, crowley is storming away: he’s submitted himself, and aziraphale hasn’t known him. he’s rejected him.
but crowley doesn’t give up. he comes back: he submits again to the mortifying ordeal. aziraphale is listening to him. this is so important. aziraphale isn’t rejecting him easily the second time. he tries to tell crowley – he tries to let crowley into his plan now, but it comes down to asking crowley to trust heaven, and crowley knows better. the conversation about crowley’s forgivability comes back, and aziraphale is telling him that even if heaven won’t, i will, and that’s what matters between them right then. but it isn’t until aziraphale comes to the conclusions about heaven on his own in his conversation with the metatron that he fully understands what crowley was really telling him, and he understands. when aziraphale goes to the bar, he understands everything crowley is telling him, everything crowley has told him, and when he says “I’m sorry to hear that” in response to “I lost my best friend,” it’s what it says on the tin!! he’s sorry!! he didn’t trust crowley and he should have!! he’s sorry for the rejection he’s sorry he didn’t understand he’s sorry he betrayed crowley he’s sorry he let crowley leave.
and then he asks crowley for help. this isn’t a skip by the apologies they need – this is direct action apology. aziraphale undoes his betrayal. he came to tell crowley where the antichrist is. he came to tell crowley how to stop him. they are back on plan-anti-antichrist. actually crowley says, “i’m not going there,” but he’s going to go where aziraphale is, and they both know it. aziraphale is saying, i believe you. i understand you. i know you. but there’s one more step for them before they achieve the reward of being loved: they have to save the world, or it will all be over. aziraphale doesn’t actually need crowley in order to do this, but he wants him there. this is aziraphale’s alpha centauri, but we don’t just save ourselves. we’re better than that. we save everyone. and crowley says, tell me where to go.
at that point, there’s no longer any question that they’re going to do whatever they have to, and they’re going to do it together.
the hill on which i will not budge: the apocalypse, the spawning of the antichrist, the great war, and the whole ineffable plan was just god playing the long game so she could get crowley and aziraphale together after 6000 years of faffing.
see originally this was just written as pure nonsense, but i’ve thought about it now and am very definitely picturing good omens’ god as one of those fic writers using all the tropes to devise wonderful and impossible scenarios to get her ship together
only it never works because of that whole pesky free will malarkey
hotel receptionist: mister crowley, mister aziraphale, there appears to have been an error with your booking. you’ve somehow been booked into the same room – and there’s only one bed.
god: oh no
god: only one bed
god: what will they do?
god: hee hee hee
aziraphale: not to worry old boy, you take the bed while I read all night in the hotel lounge so as not to make you feel uncomfortable. angels don’t need sleep anyway, you know.
ALRIGHT i’m an ancient crone and good omens was one of my earliest online fandoms, so for those of you new or newer to this delightful shitshow than about 2008, to get you started or tide you over til the new wave of fanwork starts rolling in, please enjoy a selection of some of my favorites from back in the day. (i also wrote…like, two fics and did some art, including a stupid-ambitious like 8-page comic about the angelic/demonic origins of kissing under the mistletoe, but sadly it’s been lost to time and the LJ exodus.)
i’m particularly light on artists so if anybody else remembers some please let me know!! we had good artists in the fandom, i just have the worst brain. ENJOY!!!
