30 questions fic meme, day 16: No, is too much. I will sum up.

16 – Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?

I do use summaries--I certainly like to see a summary on a story before I click on it, so I feel it's necessary to give people some idea what's ahead when I post.

I do two different kinds of summaries: pull-quotes and ... actual summaries, I guess. I've come to prefer doing pull-quotes, where I grab an evocative line from the story itself and let that stand as a representation of its content. But if there's no good line to take out of context, or if the story is really complicated or otherwise difficult to sum up properly with any one line, then you get a description of the story's premise/content.

I only hate summaries when I'm about to post and suddenly realize I never came up with one. That doesn't happen too often anymore, as I've been burned often enough that How Will I Summarize This is one of my main ways of avoiding working on a story, right up there with How Will I Warn For This, and, the all-time champ to be discussed tomorrow, What Will I Call This....

( All 30 questions under the cut tag. )

Mira Grant's Newsflesh Trilogy: the short short pimping post.

Firstly, for people who have already read Feed: Shaun & George fanart by quidly. MAJOR SPOILERS FOR FEED! But if you have read it, go look, it is lovely.


For people who maybe have never heard of the Newsflesh Trilogy (Feed, Deadline, and forthcoming in May 2012, Blackout) by Mira Grant (aka seanan_mcguire) or have heard of it and think that they are not really interested in more zombie horror whatever, here. I had it in my head a while ago that I wanted to write a pimping post, with lovingly selected bits of text, but when I went to look I found that the entire appeal of the books (especially for fangirls) can be found in a single excerpt, so this pimping post will actually be pretty short.

The protagonists of Feed and Deadline are Georgia Mason and her twin-ish brother, Shaun. (Ish, because they are actually about six weeks apart in age and not biologically related; their parents are essentially reality TV stars of the zombie apocalypse, and they adopted Shaun and Georgia as infants to serve as a neverending well of ratings boosts.) George and Shaun are twenty-something reporters just about to get the story that will make their joint career--George does straight news, Shaun is an "Irwin" who specializes in risking life and limb by going out and poking wildlife with sticks to get exciting footage. And, yes, in their world the wildlife in question is zombies. But this is not a story about zombies. It's a story of a world so filled with endless threats--from fame-whoring parents to the endless danger that the person standing next to you could turn into a zombie at virtually any moment--that it only contains one other person you can really trust.

So here, a bit of private musing from George that tells you all you really need to know about whether you want to read these books:

Sometimes we leave the connecting door between our rooms open all night. We'd still share a room if they'd let us, turn the other room into an office and have done with it. Because both of us hate to be alone, and both of us hate to have other people--people outside the country we've made together--around when we're defenseless. We're always defenseless when we're asleep.

We leave the connecting door open, and I wake up in the night to the sound of him snoring, and I wonder how the hell I'm going to stay alive after he finally slips up. He'll die first, we both know it, but I don't know . . . I really don't know how long I'll stay alive without him. That's the part Shaun doesn't know. I don't intend to be an only child for long.

Newsflesh Fic: The Only Thing I Ever Want Anymore

...I really wasn't expecting the turnaround between these posts to be quite this short, but. Fic! Ready to go! So here it is.


Newsflesh. Post-Feed, MAJOR SPOILERS. Shaun/George. 3000 words. Explicit.
Warning: Incest, and did I mention MAJOR SPOILERS. But no zombies!

For two days every month when the crazy hormones kicked in, I could count on getting knocked flat and stripped naked anytime we were alone. You're damn right I counted the days.

Many thanks to iulia for beta, templemarker for kicking my ass into actually finishing, and petra for audiencing!


( The Only Thing I Ever Want Anymore )