The Cult of Ellen

So, Christmas was nice. Alas, I woke up at 3am this morning to go to the loo and didn't manage to get back to sleep again. On the upside, I've most of the presents wrapped, including the fox cowls for my nieces. On the downside, I'll be heading out shortly along with my parents-in-law for the drive to Belfast City Airport to pick them up.

( A quick photo: )

On Saturday, I got to see my godson, his shiny new sister and his parents on Saturday, which was ace, even if all the frogs and frogspawn seem mysteriously to have vanished from the pond. On Sunday, I met up with my older sister and her mum and step-dad over at Lotherton Hall and got to go round the bird garden and see an Andean condor, a hornbill and some rheas, among many other birds, then went home and played D&D. And yesterday I couldn't get my brain into gear at all, spent an out-of-focus day on the sofa with some SG-1 fanfic, and in the evening, ( cut for being a bit depressing )

I didn't sleep well over the long weekend, least of all last night. I'm tired and I'm shaky and I'm going to be out of touch for a while, in all probability. Hopefully I'll get my batteries charged this week and be back in the saddle again soon.

This afternoon, thanks to Whatever, I read this article. Although it's very sad, it reminds me yet again how glad I am that we have civil unions in the UK, how glad I am that one by one countries are making same-sex marriage legal, that states in the US (despite California's Proposition 8) are moving in the right direction.

It shouldn't even be an issue. If both parties are adult and want to marry, sex and gender should be the least of our issues. Why should I have the right (and incredible good fortune) to be married to the love of my life just because he's male and I'm female, but not if we're both men, both women? I'm bi; I could have easily fallen in love with another woman and that wouldn't have been an issue for me, my family or (I'm pretty sure just about all of) my friends.

Marriage is where you combine your heart and your community and all the legal stuff into one declaration:

This is other half of my soul, the person who is most important to me, the person I want to spend my life with.

So I don't see how so many people can regard this as the collapse-of-civilization zombiepocalypse. It's not. With death a certainty, why put the survivor through such extra trouble? To deny people the right to marry their loved one is cruel. It's inhumane.

I do have a problem with places that allow (with parental consent) young teenagers to marry. This is right, but same-sex marriage is wrong? My mind boggles. Looking at you, Alabama, looking at you.

Other stuff:

Gakked from rhube, Uncomfortable Plot Summaries - very funny indeed.

From jaylake's link salad, vintage sexist ads.

ETA: spindr and anyone else in Sheffield who uses cash machines on Fargate and The Moor - there's a new cash machine scam going on, so be careful. Verified by staff at HSBC and a press release by South Yorkshire Police today, so probably not a hoax.

Correspondence Course has nudged over the 24k mark. It should top out at 30k, max, over the next few days.

I know I've been saying that I should be writing some of the many other things I have on the go. But actually, I've learned a few things from playing in Joss Whedon's sandbox, and at alasdair1076's encouragement, I'm sharing them.

1. Fall in love with your characters. Makes it far easier to write them.
2. Hear them talking in your head. Also makes it far easier to write them.
3. There doesn't have to be huge amounts of plot if it's about the characters. The little things fill in pretty much all the holes.
4. It's really easy to pick up someone else's toys and play with them when they've been so well crafted in the first place.
5. Which means that doing a lot of background work on characters isn't wasted time. It actually saves on huge amounts of faffing.
6. When something's eaten my head, sometimes the only way to get my head back is to let it crap me out at the end.

So there you go.