Flash fiction: The Avengers (part 2)

There’s a part of Thor which truly hates being an Avenger. Hates it because he forges these friendships, creates a new home on Earth, only to have it ripped away when he has to return to Asgard. For despite his love for Earth and the Midgardian people, Asgard must always come first.

Submitted by anon

After the Avengers saved Manhattan, Jane Foster was brought back and debriefed by Erik Selvig. Not that a lot of debriefing was required. Jane had been taken somewhere that still did have the news, after all.

The whole time Erik was talking to her, Jane was none too subtle about trying get a glimpse of Thor somewhere in the facility. So it was that several moments passed before Jane properly realised that Erik had stopped talking to her. She had the grace to look sheepish after that.

Very indulgently, Erik said in his deep and gentle voice, “Thor is with the others at Stark Towers." He knew very well that these were perhaps the first words Jane had heard him take in.

Jane didn’t need to know the street address of Stark Towers to get the first cab that pulled over to take her there. As it was, one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s cars was made available to her. Jane didn’t much care, just so long as she got there quickly.

The pale haired man who opened the door wasn’t someone Jane had ever met, but he seemed to know who she was, for he opened the door wider for her and informed her respectfully where she could find Thor.

When Thor first saw her standing there in the living room, close enough to touch, everything else in the room may as well have disappeared. He stood up from the couch, and in five firm steps Jane was enclosed in his arms.

At the front door, Steve might have been respectful of their need for time alone, but Tony coming out for his afternoon snack was nothing of the sort.

"What’s going on in there?" he asked, starting to move in the direction of the lounge room. 

Steve put up a token resistance, knowing that anything more would stoke Tony’s stubbornness to see for himself. Knowing that anything less would probably have the same effect.

So it was that Thor and Jane had less than fifteen minutes of a reunion to themselves before Tony was standing in the doorway. “Aww, isn’t this sweet?" he said, while Steve stood sheepish and apologetic behind him. “You must be Jane Foster."

The woman in question looked from Steve to Tony and back up to Thor. “Does everyone know?" she asked.

"Oh no," Tony reassured, his eyebrows drawing down over his nose. “Your secret’s quite safe with us." Then he turned his head and called out behind him, “Pepper! We have another person for dinner!"

Pepper’s voice could be heard calling back from some other area of the house. “On it!"

"I’d call Natasha to let her know you girls have an extra number to try to equal this battle of the sexes," Tony continued, attention on Jane once again.

Steve shook his head and muttered in an undertone that Jane heard quit clearly, “There is no battle of the sexes."

Tony gave no indication that he’d heard Steve’s words. “She and Barton have been at it like 16 year olds ever since we saved the world. Well, you know how it is," he said, as though he was sharing some confidence.

Jane raised her eyebrows. Well, she might know how it is, if a certain person left them alone to their reunion. So this was the famous Tony Stark, then. She would have guessed it from the attitude alone, she thought, even had it not been for the glowing device in the middle of his chest.

With a heaved sigh, Steve walked away from them. Moments later, he came back, having called in Pepper for reinforcement.

"Alright, big guy," she said, offering a smile at both her own man and Jane standing there next to Thor. His arm was still protective around her. “How about we let these two have a little private reunion time?" She began tugging on his arm at the same time as shooting an apologetic look towards Jane.

"But…" Tony looked so affronted it was all Jane could do not to laugh. Within moments, Steve, Tony and Pepper had all cleared away and she turned to Thor.

"So, you saved our world again, did you?" Jane leaned into her beloved. “You seem to be making a bit of a habit of that.

Thor gave her a small smile, but no words. What could he say? Saving Earth once had been enough. That had been time enough to forge ties with Erik Selvig and Jane’s friend Darcy, not to mention the love that had formed between himself and Jane Foster. Coming to Earth a second time had ended in branding him one of Earth’s Avengers, had created a home for him on Earth even separate to the one he had fought against forming with Jane. Nothing had changed between this and last time. He still had to return to Asgard once it was assured that no further alien attacks would be committed against Earth.

Asgard still came first to his honour, even if Midgard came first in his heart.

~~

Flash fiction supplied in excitement of the lead up towards S.H.I.E.L.D on ABC!

Sherlock: Season 3, Episode 3.

Remember when I came to you with a very disappointing update on Sherlock season three tacked onto the end of a post?

"(Unlike True Blood, BBC's Sherlock is something I'm looking forward to with baited breath. Come on season three!)"

Well, now this has happened.




This may just be the most exciting thing that has happened to me all morning.

(Of course, considering I've only been up for an hour and it's almost midday, that might be the most exciting thing that has happened to me all morning.)

Episode 3! They are up to filming episode 3 at the end of this month!

Francesca Lia Block: a loving (incomplete) bibliography.

In 2003, I was 19 years old. I was in England, staying halfway across the world with a couple of girls I had only ever talked to online. I was going through their bookshelves, and realising how similar our tastes in books were, except for this one author I'd never heard of before: Francesca Lia Block.

It was only the first time that I would come across this wondrous woman's writing. There were two books on that bookshelf; one was about a teenager who met and fell in love with a boy with angel wings, the other was the story of a girl fighting anorexia and telling her story through a series of tarot cards. I was hooked.

At 19, I was one of many young women who was struggling with an eating disorder. I was also a young woman who still believed in magic in all places. These books, speaking of realities like cancer and abuse while intermingling it with a sense of the divine or the magical spoke to me in a way that I couldn't quite describe.

My writing style changed around this time, trying to emulate the simple beauty I found in these books. 

It was 2005, I was 21, and New Zealand was the flavour of the year. A friend had a copy of Violet and Clare, a novel that I mistakenly took from its title for a lesbian love story, but I wasn't disappointed. 

2006, still in New Zealand, and leafing through a copy of I was a Teenage Fairy, the story of a young model trying to live up to the pressures of her mother, who sees fairies in the backyard and is close to one fairy, the fairy Mab, in particular. 

When I revisited this novel again in 2008, I started wondering whether these stories of real life with magical realism spoke of a deeper metaphor, whether suffering mental health was the scope through which these teenagers escaped to and regularly found outlets of the mystical and the divine. Or whether the fairies and angels were part of their delusions. 

In 2011, I did an Honours paper that included one of the short stories from Francesca's The Rose and the Beast. There, while my focus was on the short story 'Beast', I finally found my lesbian love story in the retelling of Snow White and Rose Red. 

This month, I read The Elementals, a book with lyrical writing, strong plot and many of the familiar themes I have come to associate with Francesca's various works. This novel was, in many ways, one of those "New Adult" novels we've been hearing so much about: The main character moves out from her family home, goes to college, discovers sex. But it's so much more than that. Mystery and drugs and abductions and cancer with just a hint of magical realism serve to make this a very well weaved, heart-wrenching novel by a very talented author.

For ten years , Francesca Lia Block has managed to elevate, excite, liberate, titillate and make my heart soar with her stories of sadness and beauty, magic and suffering. I love these stories. They are a part of me, and now, this year, she will be releasing her latest novel. 

Love in the Time of Global Warming is a post-apocalyptic novel with a young woman going on a journey to find her lost family. Early reviews of the book agree that this will be another one of her gritty realisms in a slightly fantastical setting which, of course, post-apocalyptic settings tend to be.

This will be the first time that I am getting on board with one of Francesca's novels as they come out. I was close, I think, when I picked up her novel Ruby (co-written with Carmen Staton). Of course, the release date for this novel is saying late August, so my only question really is how am I going to wait that long? 

Joanne Harris, 'Gentlemen and Players' and the writer's responsibility.

You may recognise this lady, Joanne Harris, who had such prudent words to say when I was having a difficult time at work.

It was a recent reblog from her blog that enticed me into reading Gentlemen & Players this month specifically. This book's been sitting on my shelves for a number of months, but this photo set and accompanying text sold me beyond doubt.

Gentlemen and Players, by Joanne Harris.

"If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past fifteen years, it’s this: that murder is really no big deal. It’s just a boundary, meaningless and arbitrary as all others-a line drawn in the dirt."

How completely evocative is that? How much more does it make me want to read it? How talented this person for putting this collection of images together in such a way?

If there's one thing I've found that is commonly inherent in Joanne Harris' books, it's that there are very few characters of conventional morals. Joanne seems to have a particular talent for drawing out these characters and making their motivations sympathetic, understandable, whether they be protagonist, antagonist, or something else entirely.

I love any excuse to post something from her Tumblr. Around the same time as the problems concerning Charlaine Harris' final book in the Southern Vampire Mysteries were making themselves public, Joanne responded to a fan letter which took it upon itself to dictate to Joanne what she should and shouldn't write. Joanne was in the middle of a five part series of blog posts on herself and her relationship to others at the time.

In response to him, she wrote,

But readers are not everything. Basically, I write because writing is necessary to me.

This is a statement I've seen written by many other writers. That's why (some of us) are paid terribly. There are an abundance of us who just need to write, not for the money, not for the readers, just for the writing.

She also went on to write,

A writer can (and should) only try to please one person at a time. That person is the writer herself – because trying to please anyone else, or modifying what you write for the sake of a real or imagined readership leads, not only to madness, but to dishonest writing. And, whatever else we expect of them, we need writers to be true. (read more)

July 2013 reading list

So I'm having a lovely time around here, working out what it's like to work as a full time admin from home while still working out how everything's supposed to look. My writing has taken a little bit of a pause of late, but that's just allowing my beta readers to catch up on a little bit of the backlog.

I've been watching a lot of Boston Legal.

I also had my first bout of depression since leaving the 'Real Life Job', which was a bit scary. I'd somehow thought that maybe my depression was being caused by going to a job I didn't like and by ceasing to go to that job, I would be magically CURED! Sad truth is, although the Real Life Job may have exacerbated the extent to which I was feeling sad, sad and depression is just something I have to look after now and again. That in itself is entirely too depressing a thought to linger on.

So! When I haven't been in the middle of all of that, I've been reading.

Here is my monthly dose of new books:

Heartless.

3/5 - An okay read, not as good as others in the series.
I remember in March, the first book that I listed was Black Heart by Holly Black. I remember it because it was the last one of its series and, as excited as I was to start reading it, I was also dreading it because it would prove to be the end of a series I had very much enjoyed. Well, there is still one more book after this in Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series, but only one.

The Night Circus.

4/5 - Imaginative and different.
I know almost nothing about this book except that the writing is said to be evocative and I haven't seen a single bad thing said or written by anyone whose advice I lean to in these matters. Onwards to finding a new author I'm sure I'll love!

The Elementals.

4/5 - Not the best book by her, but enjoyable just the same.
'I stood alone by the large window, looking out at the town below.'
This is the first new book by Francesca Lia Block that I have read for years and I am so excited by it! There's been a lot of talk about the new genre of New Adult writing going around. I think this might be the first book I'd place in that category since I started posting here. It seems, while I have not been paying attention, Francesca's visibility as a writer has gone up and up to the point where all her books are on hold or borrowed out at my local library. I'm so proud!

Something Rotten.

3/5 - This one dragged. I wanted to like it more than I did.
As I started reading the back of this book, I can't believe I've left it so long between reading the previous Jasper Fforde book and this one. It's a book whose narrative circles around Hamlet and Shakespeare! Be still my beating... I don't talk about Shakespeare enough on here. I barely even mentioned him when I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. I really should do more of it.

Gentlemen and Players.

5/5 - Amazing, simply amazing. The best book by her I've read yet!
Joanne Harris. Need I say more? I'm sure I'm in for a treat, actually. With both the lyrical writing expected from The Night Circus and from Joanne Harris, the only thing I feel I'd need to add to this would be another book from Sarah Waters, but I don't think I have any more of hers that I haven't recently read. :/

~~

As ever, for updates on how I'm going with all these books, follow me on Goodreads.com:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6878229.Nicole_D_Fergusson

Flash fiction: The Avengers (part 1)

In the countdown to S.H.I.E.L.D. premiering on ABC, I'm going to post one piece of flash fiction a month inspired by The Avengers Headcanons submissions that went around on Tumblr about a year ago. This is because I really enjoyed them at the time and want an excuse to pull them out again.

So!

**

Flash fiction: Part 1.

Steve's often the last person to end up in the kitchen during these night time meets. He offers a quick nod to Tony, who immediately quips, "Alright, movie night. Star Wars. Who's in?"

"Or..." Steve interjects, "we could watch the Wizard of Oz?"

Clint starts walking in the direction of Tony's admittedly extensive entertainment centre. It's one of his jokes that this entertainment centre is the main reason for Thor's delay in going back to Asgard.

That, and popcorn, which is what Thor's eating right now as the rest of the Avengers make their way into the large living room. There are a number of DVDs in Tony's collection. Possibly the entirety of English speaking movies. Somehow, Thor always manages to find movies that either remind him of the relationship he shared with Loki growing up, or the tattered relationship that remains. Either way, he's more than happy to turn it off in favour of whatever movie the others decide is to be put on.

Natasha sits in the next best spot in the room after the place on the couch that Thor's. She doesn't look at Steve as she replies to his earlier statement. "Steve we're not watching that again. Or ever."

Having finished his latest stash of popcorn, Thor decides it's time for a change in diet. "We will need poptarts," he calls to the kitchen, then lifts his hand when Tony throws a packet towards him upon entering the room.

Bruce leans against the arm of the couch. "I'm in... if Cupid's in," he offers, shooting a glance across at Clint.

"I'm in," he says, with a game smile. "There's beer, right?"

With beer and poptarts for all, the Avengers share each others company, marathoning and heckling the light sabre scenes in the Star Wars trilogy until the early morning sun starts to peek its way around the blinds.

Talking about YA fiction.

When I was young, the television shows I watched would be about saving the planet (Captain Planet, Widget the World Watcher) and young adult fiction was either about the finding a real life threat inside your video games (Space Demons, Skymaze), running off into some wonderful fantasy world where young women could be heroes with a sword too (Songs of the Lioness, The Blue Sword) or finding romance (The Vampire Diaries).

There's still a lot of interest in the latter, as evidenced by the television show The Vampire Diaries. You might even recognise this handsome man as the visual inspiration for one of my own characters. :)

There has also been the popularity of such series' as Cassie Clare's The Mortal Instruments, which I believe they are making into a series of movies due to come out later this year. I've also been a long time fan of Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series, which I've made no bones about loving and having almost a whole shelf dedicated to in my bedroom.



There's also the retold fairy tale genre which is really big at the moment, and includes novelists like Sarah Cross, Alex Flinn, Robin McKinley, Juliet Marillier, Francesca Lia Block and Malinda Lo.

However, there's another kind of genre within the young adult umbrella that has been pushing itself forward. We saw it in The Hunger Games novels (and movie). Marie Lu's novel Legend was another good example of it. Instead of the worries about the environment that categorised the 90s, the media aimed at young adults seems to hold a message that is: don't be so complacent that the government can rule you. Sort of a 1984 for kids, just like Space Demons might have been a good early read for people who would go on to love Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.


Two months ago, I read a book called Delirium by Lauren Oliver and read the follow up sequel Pandemonium this month. Lauren's main character, Lena, lives in a world where love has been labelled a disease for which a cure has been found. (For the full review, click here.) What I thought was amazing was how little the love angle would have mattered at all if not for the backing plot of the story. The same scenario was offered in The Hunger Games; Katniss simply couldn't spend any real number of pages simply falling in love with either of the guys. She was too busy fighting just to stay alive.

I love coming back again and again to the books in this genre. It feels as though there is so much more in YA to read today than there was 10 or even 15 years ago. Subjects like loneliness and alienation are still being tackled, but are now widening to include stories told about interracial and gay, lesbian or bisexual minorities. I read this really interesting interview by two of my favourite young adult writers recently that made me feel really proud to be reading this genre I love so much.

"Both Holly and Sarah are not shy about discussing the difficulties of promoting diversity in Young Adult literature. And they were willing to discuss their experiences in crafting their own works as a way of offering advice to other authors who are seeking to do the opposite of what has been the advice offered time after time to write what they know rather than what they may imagine." (read more)

This interview opens with questions like what advice they would give for writers who want to write outside of their own experiences with gender, race and sexual orientation and goes on through some interesting observations on the way race is depicted both on screen and by readers of these novels, including a quick look at Katniss' depiction in the recent movie The Hunger Games.

Charlaine Harris, Southern Vampire Mysteries and 'Dead Ever After'.

Okay, so, my love affair with Patricia Briggs clearly goes above and beyond any feelings I may have for Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries, or it's associated HBO television show True Blood. Time and again, I mention again how amazing I think Patricia's writing is. I don't think this blog yet has had a thing to say about the certainly more public series written by Charlaine.

At the risk of being just another commentator on the big issue that has come out of the latest--indeed, last--book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, they are in a similar enough genre to the Mercy Thompson books and I think a person must almost have been hiding under a rock to have missed the outcry that has come along with Dead Ever After.


At the core, Charlaine completed her series of books in a way that many of her fans did not like. As with many fellow authors, she had a vision for the trajectory of the series and, even with the popularity of certain characters over other certain characters, Charlaine made the decision not to waver from her original view on how the books would end.

Now, in the wake of many impassioned and angry fans, Charlaine has had to cancel public appearances and otherwise hide under her own rock until the sensation passes, instead of celebrating the end of a particularly popular series of books.

At the end of season three, I put True Blood aside when they went off and seemed to kill everyone but Sookie at the end of season three, leaving me feeling like I would have sacrificed the main character rather than lose all the rest. I ranted about it a little to my friends that year. I even started voicing it again when time came around for season four to be premiering. I certainly did not write hate mail to the author and producer of the series, or even post my opinion publicly.

As far as the books, I've been trying to figure out how far I'd gotten. Dead and Gone is the last one I read, I think. As much as I loved the 'mysteries' element of these stories, I thought that the character interaction was, on occasion, a little thin. There were a lot of questions about Sookie and Eric getting together that I thought went overlooked in favour of other things.

I've got a Goodreads.com account, and I do post reviews of all the books I read up there. All the books I finish. There have been many I haven't, and to those I simply put a 'Did Not Finish' marker on my blog here and move on.

For any books I've finished and not liked? There is always something constructive one can say about a book. I've also read my fair share of writing in various creative writing courses over the years. It is common courtesy, even when you do not like what you've just read, to say something positive before you give the criticism. I take that route whenever writing a review to a book I didn't feel was all that strong. There's got to be some reason you kept on reading it, even if you didn't like some parts of it, so why not mention those, too? (To be truthful, I also list the one or two things I thought weren't strong in books I absolutely loved.)

The issue has brought up questions of whether authors, as both artists and producers of a service, do or don't have an obligation to give their readers what they want. It's a really interesting debate, but also really scary if authors are put in a position where they have to give in to their readers if they don't want to face all this.

Of course, this is hardly the first time anything of this nature has occurred. In what's probably the most famous previous occasion of public outcry against an author's decision, and probably something that's coming to a lot of peoples' minds right now, Arthur Conan Doyle made the decision to wrap up his Sherlock Holmes series by killing him. In this case, of course, the author did give in to public outcry and brought him back.

(Unlike True Blood, BBC's Sherlock is something I'm looking forward to with baited breath. Come on season three!)

I'll tell you what, though. The public outcry over the end of the Southern Vampire Mysteries series of books has made this little read want to sit up and finish reading these books on my shelf, just to see how she did decide to finish them. :D

June 2013 Reading List

HELLO! I'm here, I'm still here. I swear it.

So, for anyone interested in the continuation of this post, I have now quit my previous job. My partner and I are the happy owners of an Aussie Farmer's Market franchise and I am... dare I say it, happy. Well, at least not waking up and dreading the day ahead. I won't speak too much about that (truthfully, I'm still working out the kinks of just spelling the word 'franchise'), but suffice to say that it's taken me away from my reading in the last two weeks of the month and, I suspect, will continue to do so for at least a little longer.

Added to that, my writing muse has come back! I blame it on this book, by Patricia Briggs. The last time I tried to pick up this novel in February, it sparked renewed interest in writing my Shadows of Melbourne series. This time, not only did it end my writer's block, but I also finished the damned thing in two days. Two days! It's a good read; the whole Mercy Thompson series is highly recommended.

Still. This month, I'm not expecting to get a whole lot of reading done. Maybe I'll use any excess time I have to finish up reading Game of Thrones.

For this next month, I've been hanging on from last month for two books in particular. These are:

Pandemonium.


3/5 - Not as good as the first one. Nowhere near.
Somehow, in my excitement of putting together my list of books for the month of May, I completely forgot to include a young adult title. This will not happen again. I've even added a whole new list of YA titles on my Goodreads.com account to ensure I will not run out. I love YA.

Seriously... I'm Kidding.

3/5 - Enjoyable but episodic. No unified story.
After reading and enjoying Portia de Rossi's memoir in April, is it any surprise that I've hardly been able to wait to read Ellen DeGeneres' memoir? I'm expecting a completely different tone for this one. Actually, I have no idea at all what to expect about this one. Maybe dolphins.

The Mad Ship.

4/5 - While enjoyable, not the best thing she has written.
Another title I've been looking forward to. Ship of Magic left a lot of questions unanswered and, I suspect,  will do the same, being as it's a second book in a trilogy. Still, my heart looks forward to sailing with Althea once more!

A Storm of Swords.

2/5 - A hard slug and a very thick book.
Actually, that idea above was a really great idea. I have about two hundred pages left of reading this, and glances through have proven to me how different it looks than the end of the HBO series so I won't be confused when I pick up A Feast of Crows.

Cry Wolf.

3/5 - Its only failing being that it's the first book in a series, yet seems to start in the middle.
I don't usually read two novels by the same author in two consecutive months, but I was planning to read this book last month until the library lost it. Also, it is the first book in a different series; Alpha and Omega rather than Mercy Thompson. As I don't actually have this title on my personal bookshelves, I had to wait. Then, lo and behold, it was ready today!

I suspect I shall have to staple my wrist to my forehead and cry 'woe!' for having to read two Patricia Briggs novels in as many months.

--

As always, follow my progress this month at my Goodreads.com account: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6878229.Nicole_D_Fergusson