Tenure comes with a lifetime supply of apostrophes

Or, my contractions, let me show you them.

So I sent off an article to a major law review, a tad over 30,000 words (including footnotes). The draft they returned to me added nearly 5000 (essentially all in the footnotes). I think word limits for law reviews are cool, but they ought to be imposed on the editors as well; swapping professorial bloat for student editor bloat is no victory. I tried to edit out the repetitive additions, caved on the merely boring ones, and balked at the ones ideologically contrary to my own strongly held views.

And of course they took out the contractions. Because why have style when you could have … Teal’c-like gravitas, I guess? Except that something written in a relatively casual style sounds worse – or, at best, comic – with the spotty formalization that comes from writing out all the contractions.

Other stuff:

On appropriation in popular music: A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul

( a thriller with an IP lawyer protagonist )

Dear Yuletide writer, and SPN

Other than what I said in the signup, I like:

Happy endings; sad endings; cliche-fic like bodyswap that shows why the cliche is useful for revealing character; the Gift of the Magi, where each character sacrifices her/himself for the other; grownups who still desire their parents' approval, whether or not it's forthcoming; the plural of apocalypse; characters who recognize that they have powerful emotions but think what they want is irrelevant because they despair of changing the conditions giving rise to their unfulfilled desires; and many other things -- I hope the prompts spark a premise for you.

With respect to Nip/Tuck specifically: I'm happy if you want to make me like Sean, or if you leave him out of it, or if you mock him as Christian does. But since I don't come to the story from a particularly Sean-friendly perspective, I will need help from you to remember why Christian really does love him (however you choose to interpret that love). Fundamentally, I think Christian's best chance for happiness was with Kimber, though that time may have passed.

(And thank you!)

( SPN spoilers: )