I'm posting this unfinished piece of VigBean because it's raining too hard to leave the office, and I'm depressed from teaching The Waste Land and from the endless ennui of buying a place to live. It will be finished in the near future, and will involve shock developments, gay bars, Orli and hostile hobbit behaviour, as well as much maniacal!Sean ( Read more... )

Filling out insurance forms as unwillingly making first grudging step on to the so-called Property Ladder:

Are there any occupational hazards in your work eg. handling hazardous substances, underground mining etc ( Read more... )

I have just read a fic in which a closeted Elijah is afraid Billy is going to vanish in a 'poof of smoke', and a fabulous FPS saga in which Legolas has 'maroon nipples' - not just once, on account of some dyeing incident, but all the timeThis is distracting me happily from the fact that I went clothes shopping today, impelled by the literally ( Read more... )

O, whiny undergraduate who needs maps, persuasion and promises of home-cooking to get him/her to attend lectures, and who then shows up hyperventilating in January, having accidentally forgotten to do an entire semester's worth of reading -

THIS is the notice I have narrowly avoided pinning to my office door, scrawled in blood, with you in mind:

( Read more... )

I sometimes suspect I chose this career out of a blundering pre-cognition that by my early 30s, I'd enjoy getting my kicks from scandalising the under-20s en masse. This is not at all difficult ( Read more... )

Two of today's marking delights ( Read more... )

I am currently in that state of abstracted madness known to all who teach - I am marking undergraduate essays. In between chewing my hands and barking at the ceiling, that is.

One student, in an essay on absurdist theatre, and having pointed out that a pair of characters almost managed to do something, has just informed me solemnly that "as my ( Read more... )

I usually post when feeling peevish, but this will be a rare non-peevish post, with distinct moments of cheer ( Read more... )

I have just taught a seminar whose participants had a collective IQ of about the same level as the classy stacking chairs on which they were slouched. Now, I have taught at various institutions for over a decade; I've dealt composedly with Oxbridge Tweedy Gits, Central London Urban Guerrillas, Nice Girls in Alice Bands, Pathologically Shy ( Read more... )

Two links on a NaNoWriMo forum made me smile in a slashy way. Peculiar spellings and syntax are original.

First is an account of Writing the Love Scene, a how-to-write-sex session with an 'author of nine historical romances', who is unironically introduced as 'having a lot of spunk'. Her audience, it seems, is curiously prudish.

At the starting ( Read more... )