Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without

Am I really starting to confuse these two people?

  
Dean Winchester                                   Pam Ewing

Let me explain....

SPOILERS!!SPOILERS!!SPOILERS!!SPOILERS!!SPOILERS!!SPOILERS!! for Season 7
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I've been doing the E/O Challenge for a little while, this is on FanFiction.net where you're sent a prompt word by Enkidu07 or Onyx Moonbeam and you have to use it in an exactly 100 word-long story.

This week the word of the week was "Storm" and everyone seemed to write a damn fine drabble.


(this is an advert for 'Artemis', a UK Investment company - everytime I see it I think of Supernatural)

Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or its characters - these were created by Eric Kripke - I'm just borrowing them. I'm not making any commercial gain. No harm or infringement intended.

E/O Challenge: Storm. 'The Storm' a 100 word drabble. A storm rages overhead triggering unpleasant memories. Spoilers for up to early season 7. Non-Wincest Hurt/Comfort.

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So I have a couple of ducks. No, I don't live on a farm. Yes, this is considered to be a little unusual.

These are actually the second pair I've owned, a male/female pair, the first two were killed by a fox.

They're Aylesbury Ducks, which means they're big and have amazingly huge, white-feathered wings - or they're white when they've not been flapping about in the mud. I tell you, ducks are dirty.



When they're chicks they have yellow feathers, then they moult (which they then seem do a couple of times a year) - and the first time this happened I commented it was like "an explosion in a pillow factory". What a great phrase - I squirreled it away for future use.

After finishing "The End of the World" I needed to write a couple of lighter fics, I did that with a couple of drabbles, but I needed to do something a bit more, and I was already part way through "Castiel's Day" (I seem to quite often come up with a new fic while working on a current one - plus I'm a big fan of writing something else if I find I get stuck with my current work).

The phrase came up in conversation and it clicked in my head and so "Scritch, Scritch, Scritch" was born! (I'm not sure I like the title though)

I had some really nice comments, unfortunately many anonymous, so I can't reply with thanks, but one comment did make me laugh...

"i just have to say it (because reading this means that i'm not studying for my biology finals): arthropods molt. Birds do not molt. Nor do angels...to the best of my knowledge. ;)"

Am I missing some difference in meaning because I used the US "molt" instead of my more normal "moult"? (I like to write SPN in US English - it's a "stylist affectation"!)

I have a dog too, and she definitely moults, seemingly constantly!

I think you really need to study for that biology test!

BTW I googled "arthropod" and screamed like a baby!

Done a fair amount of FanFic posting last month or so, but not very much LJ -  too raw at the time.

The FanFic's been great for working things out, and getting stuff off my mind, I think because I can hide behind the characters.

I really feel like I written some okay stuff recently, and the E/O Challenge has been like a God-send in keeping me writing. It's so simple, who would have guessed that the trick to beating writer's block seems to be to actually write something down :)

Finding out last month that Nic had killed herself was shocking, an unexpected punch to the gut, even though it's been a couple of year's now since I last saw her, so it's almost like I don't feel I have a right to be upset. The worst thing is how angry I feel with her. My main memories of her are her appalling inability to make a decent cup of tea, and a photo of us all sitting on the sofa with the dog and laughing, and it makes me weep, and I want to scream at her. I can't help but remember Dad coming back from the service of a work colleague who'd killed himself and how shaken he'd seemed when he described how damning the chaplain had been about what faced suicides in the afterlife.

I wrote Prayer for Better Times at the time I found out, then recently End of the World to try to describe how angry I felt, obviously it's primarily about Dean/Cas so it's not autobiographical, but I can't help wishing there was something I could have done. There are people in my life now that I worry about and I feel that I should, and need to, reach out to and even now I still find it so hard to do. I almost didn't publish, I'm not sure how people are going to react to it - I don't really care if people don't like it, so long as they don't hate on it.

(;,;)

I'm nearly ready to unleash the last chapter of Opheliac Angel -  and just discovered that there's no such word as "innoculous" it's "innocuous" - oops, thanks FanFic!

On the plus side all those missing tweets turned up in one go (yes, that was sarcasm)

"Happy Birthday" - the last chapter's pretty much been done for a while, but I'm still struggling with the penultimate one.

Even though Frank has spoken, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to dust off No Leaf Clover in time before the explosion in FanFic that'll inevitably hit come Friday...

One of side effects of adopting the "Chuck Shurley" approach to writing led to a late night (early morning?) copy and paste accident with Evernote which almost led to a loss of several days work - luckily some offline caching meant I did eventually get most of it back, but it's taken hours to try to sort it out.

Recently some of my best work's been "flow of consciousness" on the commute followed by a late evening spell check, rewrite and general polish. Trouble is that from today everyone is now back at work and the trains were completely overflowing again. Claustrophobia kicked in big time and I eventually had to get off shaking like a freakin' leaf - which was totally embarrassing, not to mention it made me late for work and meant I wasn't able to do any writing. Eventual;y a train arrived that wasn't packed to the rafters and by the time I got to work I felt like I'd already done a full day.

I'm working predominately on the last chapter of Happy Birthday, some of it from Bobby's PoV, but I'm generally happy with it, but it's taking such a long time to hammer out the details.

One of the serendipitous aspects of writing this story has been the discovery of a New Zealand band called "Shapeshifter" - I particularly like Dutchies.

Am I the only one that hates the first of each month because it resets the default story stats chart over at FanFiction.net?

I'm currently looking at zero hits and zero visitors - and  it's not good for my self-esteem!

The events in Norway are truly awful - I can't process the number the number of people who have died. This isn't a terrible accident like the high-speed train collision in China that's killed over thirty people - that's bad enough - but it's someone has decided to do this deliberately.

Now we're told the gunman felt it was "gruesome, but necessary". I'm not sure I want to hear an explanation, I can't imagine there is anything he can say that's going to make me understand the reasons for his actions - other than the obvious that he's insane.

At the risk of trivialising the incident, it did fit in with the recurring idea in my writing over the last couple of weeks of "Why do terrible things happen to good people"?

I've been trying to write several stories at once, including the Three Faces of Winchester Chapter 7 which is focusing on the episode "Faith". It really tied in with Layla's quote at the end where she says "If you're gonna have faith, you can't just have it when the miracles happen. You have to have it when they don't"

I'd also found the quote below on a religious website called FaithDefenders, while "researching" for my story "Opheliac Angel",
 
I believe in the sun even if it isn't shining,
I believe in love even when I am alone,
I believe in God even when He is silent.

I thought it was beautiful - it really resonates with what I believe.

While I was Googling to see who said it , I found it had been adapted into a song called "I Believe in Love" by BarlowGirl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7_Xb5KHDeQ
I'd not heard of this group before, I like the song and what it stands for, but I don't share all the specific beliefs that BarlowGirl seem to promote elsewhere.

The reason for the visit to the FaithDefenders site (among others) was that I wanted to get the religious skinny on the "end justifies the means". Is it okay to do evil in the cause of good?

Obviously Cas thinks it is, so does Sue Ann the preacher's wife in "Faith", so too does the Norwegian gunman with his talk of "gruesome, but necessary". 

Not sure about the FaithDefenders site it seems to be arguing humans are inherently evil by default - I don't agree with that - I think it's probably true to say that no one thinks they are evil, and as they quote:

Proverbs 16:2: “All the ways of a man are clean in his own sight, But the LORD weighs the motives.”

We might think we're doing good, but God knows what's truly in our heart when perhaps we don't know ourselves.

The other quote I found was:

“He who does not punish evil, commands it to be done.” Leonardo da Vinci

I realise that this probably conflicts with the messages above, but the sense is that by standing by and allowing evil to happen we tacitly giving approval for that evil to continue.
 
didn't really deal with this in Chapter 7, but in the episode Faith this is best expressed by Dean wanting Layla to be cured, but knowing that by allowing it to happen he was condemning someone else to death - therefore he couldn't allow it to carry on. The closest I came was Dean's questions about his survival at the cost of Marshall - but that also draws in Dean's feelings of worthlessness, which really deserves a chapter all of its own!