I did it again.

So after reading the Sailor V manga, it seems really sad to see Venus so flat-out serious and sad in the Crystal anime. I really like her to know when to be serious, and the idea that she's a little more grown-up than the other Senshi, since she's been fighting longer, but for her to lose all of her fun-loving attitude is too sad. Suddenly she just seemed so bland in Crystal.

I ended up ordering the plushie tonight. I have two gift cards I'm waiting to get for Amazon, but those might not come until towards the end of the month and I really didn't think this plush would hang around that long, since there was only one left at the price I wanted. I wibbled a bit over whether I'd made the right choice anyway, but I've calmed down now and I think I'm pretty happy with my decision. I'm glad I got to see the plushie in F.Y.E. this week. I like to see in person what I'm getting, and it was the seeing that made me decide I definitely wanted that plush.

Also, I really like that by buying the plush from this person, I'll still have some money left over to put towards more stuff. If I'd bought the DVDs, with tax it probably would have drained every bit of the fun money for this month.

And after all that U.N.C.L.E. writing and coming up with three possibilities for the fanzine (the third of which I used for submission, as decided), I ended up with other ideas for online fics. I had to review the episode in order for any of the ideas to work, and while doing so, I discovered I'd completely forgotten that Mr. Wye just seems to completely lose it after he finds Mr. Ecks stabbed in the park. He flips out on the retired female agent working with U.N.C.L.E., even blaming her for what happened in the park despite knowing she was not the one who did the stabbing.

I hadn't even taken Mr. Wye into my equation when I wrote the drabbles with Ecks a couple of years ago, but after a review I did of the episode back then, I started thinking he needed to be involved. But I hadn't watched the episode straight through again at that point. Now that I have, I can't shake the idea that Mr. Wye and Mr. Ecks must be very close, and of course, that's the instant trigger for me to become fascinated.

The end result: I decided to do another month-long 31_days challenge of vignettes, focused around them. Right now I'm sticking to episode-based, fleshing out my ideas for them to both survive their ordeals. The piece I'm most proud of so far, I think, discusses their organization and its goals and how and why they decided to betray it with Mr. Zed. (Mr. Zed ... LOL. Why do the British hate saying Zee?)

At this point in the vignettes, they are separated and each is afraid the other is dead. And I successfully made myself sad with this past day's piece. (I also successfully grossed myself out by spending over an hour reading about the various possible consequences of being stabbed somewhere in the abdominal region.) I need to get to the reuniting vignette soon or I may burn out (especially since I honestly hate writing extended hospital stays). After I get to that point, I'm not sure where the rest of the pieces will go. Some may flash back to their time in the organization, while others may stick with the present. I may have them encounter Illya and/or Napoleon some more and exchange some unfriendly banter. Or I may just stick with fleshing out the interaction just between them. Naturally I will only post the pieces to 31_Days, unless there's one with Illya and/or Napoleon present as well. I wouldn't imagine anyone but me would be interested in reading/writing about these oneshot episodic characters.

I started the set on the 3rd, so I'll need to do the first two as make-up pieces on the 31st, when we're allowed to post pieces for any day. Hopefully I'll be able to get ahead enough in writing the vignettes that I won't be writing those pieces plus the 31st's prompt all on the same day. It takes me at least an hour to get a good vignette for this series. Currently I'm managing to write each piece on the day it's for. Usually when I do these theme sets I can write some pieces ahead of their time, so I want that to happen again, and it may, if I can get at least one other project done first. I'm thinking prompt #2, "eyes the color of water", will be at least partially about when they first meet. Chrissy has such beautiful blue eyes....

As I wailed on Tumblr, why can't I ever just stick with writing for the good guys for long?

I know the answer to that, really. It's because while friendships between good guys are squeeable, you'd expect good guys to have friendships. With bad guys, it's not always something you can expect. And when I see it, I'm intrigued. It's the same basic principle as to why I find certain antagonists endlessly fascinating, like Coley Rodman. If they show they still have some goodness despite unsavory things they're doing, I must know more about them and write about them and pick their minds apart.

And then sometimes my interest is a little more shallow, like if a favorite actor plays the character. But they still have to have some other reason to warrant me being interested enough to write about them. Being killed in the episode is often, but not always, one thing that will make me write about them, as I'm trying to fix the death. And I may not warm up to them fully for a while. It was that way with Snakes. After I wrote so many stories with him and let him develop as a character, however, I became very fond of him. That also started my crush on his actor. I have little doubt that before I'm done with this theme set, I will be quite fond of both Ecks and Wye.

Another thing I mused on is that while I have one list of my "darlings", then there's a list of "actors I like by association". If they play off of a darling especially well, or even repeatedly, I tend to become fond of them on some level. I'm fond of Pippa Scott because of her playing against H.M. Wynant on I Spy, for instance, and Allison Hayes for being with him on Perry Mason and Shotgun Slade. I started out being fond of Luke Andreas because of him playing off of Chrissy on The Rockford Files. Luke is a unique case, as I ended up loving him so much, he became a darling too. I'm fond of Joe E. Tata for his association with both of them. And I'm fond of Hedley Mattingly for his playing off of Chrissy ... twice. Apparently it was either a weird coincidence or somebody thought they worked well together. About four years after U.N.C.L.E., they're teamed up again on Mannix. Neither of them die that time. Actually, that episode (All Around the Money Tree) is the only really humorous episode of Mannix and is also only one of two episodes out of 194 where nobody dies. That's ... kind of a sad track record, actually.

...

So it suddenly occurs to me to wonder, I hope the Venus plush is the correct size. The stock picture was the big one, and the weight of the package fits, so one would assume the individual seller was aware of that and listed their product on the right page. One wouldn't think the small size plush would ever sell for that price, but I saw some outrageous prices for her on eBay. All there is now is to wait and see.

And I got up today's vignette, in which Vivalene bothers Ecks. She turns up in most of my fandoms and I thought it would be fun to see her there. The setting is the present-day, as per my preferences, since to my surprise the Cold War didn't really seem to play any part in the series with regards to Illya's presence. (I.E., no one ever seemed alarmed that a Russian was there, etc., so time period seems of little importance.) Nevertheless, for pieces posted on FF.net and such, I will probably try as much as possible to be ambiguous and not state a time period one way or the other, since I know most people prefer it to be the time in which the series was made.

Ecks still thinks Wye is dead, and Vivalene is only furthering those thoughts (albeit Vifa really thinks he's dead). I'm still anxious to get to the reunion, but I'm not downright upset like I was last night. I think that had less to do with them thinking each other dead and more to do with my distress over the injury and the treatment and the extended hospital stay. It downright upsets me to write things involving extended hospital stays, as mentioned, especially if said stay includes any length of time in which the patient can't perform normal bodily functions themselves without tubes and machines everywhere (which certainly is the case for injuries like that, probably moreso than some other injuries). That is just disgusting and gross. What I wrote didn't actually touch on any of that, but it was a hospital piece and it upset me just knowing what must have happened that I didn't write about. I thought I was upset more because I can't stand hospitals in general, after my grandmother was in one for so long and we kept going in for long hours several times a week. That's probably part of it too, but I think I figured out it's the other element that bothers me most. But ah well, there was nothing I could do about that, since I wanted the character to survive the injury and that would mean he'd have to suffer through the treatment for it.

And then I also think I'm just plain feeling guilty for writing about some more antagonists. It takes me a while to get used to doing that each time it happens, because I always feel like I shouldn't be doing it. Sometimes I never do stop feeling that way; I slacked off on those Once Upon a Time vignettes because I kept feeling guilty to write about Mr. Gold after all the horrible things he's done.

Anyway ... I'm kind of thinking I'll write the reunion piece for Wednesday's theme, but we'll see.

And apparently my post where I was trying to find out some other details of such an injury made it into the top 25 posts for today, according to Livejournal. That's cool. I never thought any post of mine would be quite that popular.