My. Head. Hurts.
Today (or technically, yesterday) was the crappiest day, and there were three points of crap on that graph, which constitute a trend, I guess. (Five points are better, according to our six-sigma black belt.) So, I could describe it in detail, but you know what? Meh. Not unless I can be funny about it--which I can't--or I need to vent--which I don't. But, after this pricelessly crappy day, I had the best evening ever, getting to spend time with S., whom I've missed dearly. S. did not flee in the face of my incipient meltdown, but instead hung around and spent ridiculous piles of dosh on me, taking me to see "Chicago" and then to a dinner so stunning that it could have made cows tip over with spontaneous bovine orgasms. And she made me a Mix CD of Happiness.
But really, the best part was just getting to spend time with her and shoot the shit, and chat about all things fannish, highlights of which may be viewed on the upcoming UPN special, "For the Love of Xander!"
Prior to that, in a brief neutral zone of time between the craptastic day and the fantastic evening, I spent a little while outlining more of my imaginary AU season five and still coming up against the issue of content vs. canon tone. (I use the word tone, though what I really want is some word that comprises genre, tone, style, audience level, focus, etc. What is that? Maybe I should call it the Buffyverse "signature" or "idiom.")
I don't know why it's such a mental roadblock, and it irritates me. I want to do episodic stories, but I want to be slashcentric, which is all about the boys. The focus of the show is primarily on Buffy, and you can't ignore that if you want to adhere to canon in more than a mere factual way. It's also an ensemble, but if I spend as much time on X/S as I *want*, it'll unbalance the recipe of canon. I did that deliberately in "Sidelines," to an extreme; but I don't want to repeat that story's strange format. I want the pleasure that comes of building a slash relationship within the constraints of canon, like a ship in a bottle, because I think the more pitch-perfect plausible their ship is--as something that could have been canon--the more exquisitely it satisfies the reader. Though by reader I could just mean "me." And admittedly, it's just one flavor of satisfaction among many possible flavors, but it's one of the tastiest.
The Catch-22 is that to achieve the benefits of that "high canon" context, you sacrifice the ship; for it to float, you have to flood the bottle with A-plots and other people's characterization arcs, until the ship is submerged, becoming a partial, incomplete representation.
Sometimes these elaborate analogies just fly out my ass like monkeys.
I am sleepy.
More people should go read
Becoming random. Must sign off....
Edited because I realized I spelled "merripestin" wrong. That is fixed!