hmpf

There's still something I utterly don't get about slash in LoM fandom - and it's not the sex, although that still doesn't do anything for me. But I 'get' why the sex might be interesting for people.

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Title: The MAD Doctrine
Author: Hmpf MacSlow
Rating: General audiences or teen and up
Word Count: ca. 6,500 words
Notes: Stellar beta, as usual, by the very awesome beccatoria. Much useful discussion, throughout the years of this fic's gestation, was had with space_oddity_75. Official Bowie consultant: jazzymegster. Other musical advice: lozenger8. Footnote formatting advice: mikes_grrl. Also, thanks to anyone else who endured my ramblings about this story in the past five years.
Soundtrack and lyrics: Here. (Link fixed.)
Summary: Back to the future. . . the long way 'round.

This will be posted to lifein1973 as well, in a moment.

( The MAD Doctrine )

(Edited.) This is a more precise version of the question previously posted here:

http://community.livejournal.com/lom_workshop/26523.html

ETA: If you know a bit about 80s and 90s music, please check out my question. I could really use some help.

God, how I hate it to be so frelling inspired, with absolutely no time to write. (Three job applications, minimum, are due this week, the first of them tomorrow.)

I want to go back to Sam and Annie and radioactive vegetables and New World rock. They've finally begun talking to each other again, too. No fair! Inspiration is so rare for me, why does it have to happen *now*?

Because I just discovered these again on my webspace:

The very gorgeous John Simm emoting most beautifully all over the place.

(ETA: No particular connection between the titles of those files/links and the images, btw. I just randomly assigned all the words of the sentence one image each; so 'beautifully' is *not* the most beautiful, etc.)

I just felt like it.

Stumbled across that screencap today among my files, and, well, that's one of the few unequivocal instances of Sam being sort of awesome, so there.



Yes, I know it's bad. Hey, I don't know the first thing about my graphics program; and I only have one not-completely-horrible font. I know it's too dark, and I know the font size is too big; but it was the smallest the program would do. And if I put in the text earlier, when the image's still big, it always comes out all blurry in the end.

I notice that all the recs so far in the het category of this year's recommendations week at lifein1973 are Sam/Maya. Now, that does please me. However, I also notice that all the recced fics (I've browsed them, not read them properly, because I'm in a bit of a hurry right now - shouldn't be posting here, either, really) are about them separating/about how the relationship really never worked properly. And, yeah, I've been having one hell of a difficult time writing my own Sam/Maya fic, myself.

I wonder: is it possible at all to write a *working* Sam/Maya relationship? Or does it always have to be broken from the start/broken beyond repair? Of course, with slash goggles firmly in place the obvious answer would be something like "it never worked and never will because Sam's actually gay, even if he doesn't realise it." But I sort of want to believe that what was wrong with the relationship was something *other* than just repressed homosexuality - something even more complicated, perhaps - that was wrong with Sam; something that may be fixed.

But is this me being too pollyanna to see reality?

I just stumbled upon this description of SUV users from a market report by the automobile industry:

"They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."

Now, I'm not 100% sure if Sam's car really counts as an SUV, but it certainly rather looks like one - and the description fits him rather well...

I need to print this out and tack it to the wall above my screen when I'm writing Sam, because I tend to write him far too nice (misled in my mental image of him by the not all that infrequent moments in his 1973 life in which he's *not* acting like an asshole, damn those inconsistent LOM writers *g*). I'm certainly writing him rather too nice in the 'private' fic I'm writing at the moment - although that's partly justified by its being a sort of epilogue to mindfic, i.e. the 'end result' of a much longer story in which he has plenty of time and opportunity to change.

You know, I *love* playing around with time travel fic ideas in LoM. I think about bringing the 1970s crowd to the present; I take Sam (who in my personal canon is in the present, at least most of the time) back into the past; I have them all jumping between times randomly...

Yet at some point these bunnies always die. And it's mostly Sam who kills them. Because as soon as I make it a definite case of time travel, i.e. a situation in which he can't tell himself anymore that he's dreaming, he either goes a bit mad, or he starts to get too inquisitive for his own good. He wants to know how in hell it is possible, he wants to know what caused it - and he wants a believable explanation, not some handwaving, because he's Sam. And time travel takes over the story, and I have to invent old classmates who went into quantum physics and just *happen* to be involved in certain experiments, or bring in the Doctor (usually with Rose as Sam's cousin, and a kind of accidental transfer of 'powers' as the deus ex machina-like explanation. That *sort* of works to shut Sam up, although he mostly still reacts with the other option he has beyond being inquisitive, namely, going a bit mad. Sam's not the type for taking something fantastic in stride; he's been questioning his sanity for too long.)

Depending on how I do the time travel it's hard, sometimes, even to get Sam to interact with time-travelling 1970s people. The last time I brought some over to the present he spent the first 24 hours just glaring at them, or pointedly ignoring them. And who can blame him - here he was thinking he was finally doing okay again in the sanity department, yet there are his 'hallucinations' again - only this time they haunt him in the present. Not the most reassuring thing that could happen to you if you've just overcome what you can only frame as suicidal delusions.

So, I think I'll probably never be able to write an actual time travel story. (Reading them is somewhat easier, although there, too, I have problems with the handwaving, sometimes.)

Irony? Where?

The current Sam Death Count in fic by Hmpf:

Starving on the Jump Down: all about Sam dying.

Round the Bend in Eighty Days: starts with Sam dying (and did so long before series two even began, I may add.)

Möglichkeitssinn: prospect of death on the horizon.

Back to the Future: ditto, though it's partly a utopia, so maybe I'll add a miracle cure.

Miracle: prospect of death on the horizon. Possibly.

Borderlands: starts out with Sam already dead.

How to Love a Madman: alive and well! Honest! (Just a bit insane, but that's par for the course.) *g*