Meme see, Meme do

[rthstewart]

Really bad week.   I've been dealing with babysitting and cooking for many, many children not my own through 4 days of snow-related school cancellations and power outages and I'm very much understanding that the Donner Party probably turned cannibal and ate their young first. We've lost power, again, and have been camping out either in cold dark houses or in light, overly warm houses filled with children I am babysitting while the parents are all at work.  Oh, and the $20 ice cream cake for the kid's birthday tomorrow melted. So, I've been alternating on the Blackberry between increasing frantic work emails coupled with a growing panic that maybe things are repeating and I did something wrong in the latest chapter of AW. Again.  So, I'm trying not to cry or angst, because really, I'm just being stupidly insecure. 

Also we had 30 enormous donuts that were supposed to go for the class party (canceled due to snow) and I never want to see another glazed donut again, ever.  Or Mac and Cheese and hot dogs.   On the plus side, as workers crawled home in the a nightmare of ice, snow, and gridlock this week, I was at home babysitting 6 children ages 12 and under and did not have to 1) sit in my car for 8 hours trying to go 10 miles; 2) get stuck and run out of gas in a snowstorm; 3) park the car and walk home as many did, then have to find the car the next day after it was towed; or 4) give up and sleep in a gas station or check into a motel where you pay by the hour. 

I'm still not King but I do have Power as of this morning. So, I'm now in my own house, with own firewall, with light and heat and I spent 4 hours actually doing writing work that pays and cursing junior staff who don't understand how to redline documents.

And now I have fallen to the meme-side and I lovingly blame the f-list, including snacky  metonomia  lady_songsmith  anastigmatfic and animus_wyrmis who have been circulating these memes.  And then Ana went and posted a fabulous one involving Glendon, Edmund, and a tree, and now I just HAVE to play along because I have a BAD RL WEEK and FIC ANGST. 

So, these are the memes:

• Ask me a fandom-related question in the comments. This can be fandom specific, general, or about fandom/lj stuff/fic writing/etc. in general. Questions can be as wacky as you want. Ask me about tv shows, characters, fanfic in general, fandom issues/meta, anything about any of my stories specifically.

OR

• Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, a short excerpt, or something else that I want readers to know.

OR

• Name a character and I will tell you:

a) a fact about them from my personal canon
b) a reason he/she sucks
c) a reason he/she is amazing
d) a thing that I'd like to see happen to them
e) someone that I can't ship that character with

 

Comments

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

Good luck with the work and presentations!
Asim's background is way harder than it should have been but he has neglected to enlighten me as to most of it.

I believe he was born into a Bedouin nomadic tribe somewhere in the Levant near the Red Sea in around 1900. He was caught up in the Arab nationalist movement very early on and used to go sneaking around into Turkish encampments to spy. When he began riding (horse or camel) in the Arab Irregulars, that's when he picked up English. He admires Allenby more than TE Lawrence and when he was riding around with Allenby's crew, someone in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force recommended him to the Arab Bureau in Cairo. Asim gets pretty cagey about what happened after that and says nothing about the inter-War years. He learned French during his time in Morocco and Algeria and Italian when he traveled south in what was then Italian East Africa (parts of Ethiopia and Somalia).

He found God (or rather, God found him) when he was wandering through the Atlas Mountains in Morocco near the town Demnat and a Sufi Muslim shrine. He had never been an especially devout man before, so this was quite a surprise when, like Saul of Tarsus, he was strike blind and lay on the roadside for a day before a vulture decided to test if he was really dead or just in a state of religious shock. Digory Kirke was the first person he had ever seen who glowed with God's light, thereby affirming that the message he had understood in Demnat and then in the Marrakech souk was correct and that he was supposed to follow this British schoolgirl around.

It never occurred to him to disobey that order.

He likes chocolate and very, very strong coffee, and really does not "get" women at all. I don't ship him with anyone. Ever. It sucks because he really does not know what he is looking for, but whatever it is, I hope he finds it. He has a pretty flexible morality without a home or a family or roots or ties. He and Mr. Patel are very good friends and but it's actually Lin Kun who understands him best, even if they barely speak to each other at all.