we're all stories in the end

For my own reference as much as anything.

+ tightpresent is a Sarah Connor Chronicles vid exchanges, with signups opening today.

+ Originated on tumblr but now spread across fandom, it has been declared that is Femslash February. There's a lot of activity on tumblr, including this call for seeing more femslash for Black women, but there's also discussion at girlgay.

+ halfamoon / halfamoon has started up again. Two weeks of celebrating female characters, whee!

+ purimgifts is open - sign up to make and receive gift baskets of small fanworks about Jewish characters and/or women and/or people on the run from evil viziers.

+ And over at white_lotus, the Lunar New Year is approaching and we'll be posting exchange fanworks soon! (If you didn't sign up for the exchange but think you might be able to pinch hit for Avatar:tLA or Legend of Korra, email whitelotusmods at gmail to be added to the mailing list.)

I'm not sure how much of the above I'll be able to participate in due to being super busy*, but I can't wait to see the results!

* I am working away on all of your commissions - thank you again for those, so much - as well what feels like a slightly absurd amount of other things. I think I'm on top of it all! But if I'm supposed to be doing something for you and I've gone suspiciously quiet, it's always okay to get in touch and give me a nudge, I find that v helpful.

2011 fic & vids roundup!

( stats )

( Full list of fanworks this year: )

( meme questions )

( fic WIP extracts )

+ verasteine, thanks so much for the little canine friend sitting on my LJ! *ruffles her pixellated ears*

+ There are some new people around here - hello! Feel free to drop by and introduce yourselves, if that's a thing you're into. If you're more a lurking type, know that you are warmly welcomed also. :D

+ In Epic Fail news, United Airlines apparently have this policy where they treat passengers with disabilities like total shit. cleolinda has more. (Warning: rage-inducing!)

+ Dear everybody who has finished/has a draft/is on their way to finishing their Club Vivid vids: omg I hate you all. (Not really.) I -- at least I'm gathering source now?

+ The reason for the above is that I have just failed to meet yet another self-imposed deadline re. my help_haiti pieces. Woe! They are all on their way, just unwilling to be finished, apparently. Curse you, uncooperative fanworks!

+ Have a poem. This is the first 'grown-up' poem I ever fell in love with.

( The Lake Isle of Innisfree, W. B. Yeats )

+ Ugh, I am cranky today after running my uni's LGBT stall this morning. PRO TIP. If you don't know what 'LGBT' stands for and you lean in to peer at the GIANT RAINBOW BANNER to find out, things not to do when you work out the acronym include a) pulling a face, b) looking at us as though we're about to give you cooties, and c) pointing it out to your friends so you can all have a good laugh. Just -- don't do that. Oh, and also, please don't come and seek us out specially so you can give us all on a sermon on how you used to be gay only the Holy Spirit saved your immortal soul and made you straight. Really, don't.

*sigh* I resent people who make my job harder than it has to be!

Anyway - this is going somewhere, I promise - I am thus extra pleased to see that queerlygen is open for business. There are already stories in Merlin, SGA, Leverage and more, and if you feel inspired you can see all the prompts gathered to date here.

+ I have SO MUCH WRITING I should be doing, oh dear. *leechblocks self* (Have I mentioned how Leechblock is my new favourite Firefox extension? Because it really is!)

( WIP list )

-- Happy, happy birthday to snegurochka_lee for yesterday, elvenkitty for today and nk_aeode for tomorrow! ♥ ♥ ♥ I hope you all celebrate wonderfully.

-- I forgot to mention before, I'm reccing on calufrax all this week, a great community that highlights Whoniverse stories hosted on Teaspooon.

-- I'm working on too many things with not enough time, what else is new, and I do wish I could just sit down and take something right the way through the end as opposed to continually tacking small bits onto about half a dozen projects.

-- Said flitting around probably explains why more SGA fic decided to write itself last night:

The Twilight & The Peace
Stargate: Atlantis ; John/Rodney ; 1100 words ; a snippet of the far future for mcsmooch
"You're a sentimental old fool, you do know that?"

Jack & gang save the world in a minute! Whee, new Torchwood audio, how excited am I?

---

What in the hell, I am suffering from a continuing attack of plot in my stories. This does not usually happen to me! It was bad enough with the quick-fire round of rs_games that prompted the 10k first installment of an epic AU arc, rapidly followed by my brain deciding to churn out another long plotty thing for thestopwatch. I was hoping that would be the end of it, but no. I am very belatedly working on a story from prompts cherryfeather gave me, namely Jack & Ianto & the Doctor & the TARDIS. Which, you know, I was thinking along of the lines of 'yay alien planet' and possibly some Ianto snark and the Doctor trying really hard to impress him after the whole bigger on the inside shtick fails, because hi, Torchwood London, and Jack would be amused and then make out with Ianto a little bit, etc etc. THERE IS NO PLOT THERE. And yet! Suddenly I find myself a couple of thousand words into a story about Weevil liberation, which apparently must play out first before I can get to any of that. *facepalm* I do not even know.

Which is not to mention all the other WIPs I'm trying to get done just now [the sequel to 'Late Bloom', the epic Jack fic of epicness] that did have plot to start with. and really I did so want to get most of this finished and out the way in the next month, because then I'm into coursework and NaNo which will probably kill me.

In short, writing hard, in a breaking newsflash, heh.

There is an Impromptu Pep Talk Meme going round! Cheerlead the writers and artists and designers of fandom as they soldier on with projects. You can find me here as I boggle at all the different things I'm trying to write just at the moment. [eta: now, err, with working links]

Here, have some snippets from some of the non-exchange WiPs that are at least semi-currently being written. All Doctor Who, no spoilers past 4x05.

A UNIT-ish Martha/Tom story, or, ( how exactly did that happen, then? )

Horrifically belated Rose/Martha fic for churchontime: ( our heroes have found themselves in a strange land, beset by cats wielding pitchforks! )

And then there's this one (5000 words and counting) which has been eating my brain for a good while now, ( a somewhat epic intergalactic Jack/Doctor story: )

lgbtfest's prompts are now available for claiming, from now until March 15th. With 901 prompts to choose from in a huge variety of fandoms covering all kinds of different subject matter centered around the experience of being queer in some way or other, this looks like it's going to produce some fascinating stories. Peruse prompts here, the calendar of posting dates here, and claim your prompt and date here!

I've snagged this, which is a story I've been meaning to write for ages anyway: Luna has always had as open, untroubled, and inquisitive an attitude toward sexuality as toward everything else, but other people aren't quite so accepting.

Exciting stuff!

Whee! To join in the squee appearing on the flist, it is that time again, when possibly the mother of all multi-fandom exchanges descends upon us. All hail remixredux08!

The basic premise of Remix, for those unfamiliar, is fairly simple: take someone else's story, rework it, e.g. by changing the POV or the tone. The way it works gets a little more complicated than that, but there's full instructions and a link to the sign up post here.

You need five 500 word stories to qualify to be remixed in a given fandom, and I'm only one story off in Doctor Who, so I shall probably rattle something off before the deadline (February 23rd). Considering I also have one Torchwood fic in the works, I am contemplating whether it would be very crazy to attempt two more ficlets there as well over the course of the week to qualify. (This raises the question of why on earth I haven't written more in either of these fandoms before, to which I have no good answer.) We shall see!

But yay, because I enjoyed this so much last year, from writing my own submission, (It goes like this (the slowing heartbeat remix), adapted from glass_icarus), to receiving a reworking of The Shores of the Sea (The Edge of the River (The Hudson Palisades Remix) by cedarlibrarian), to reading all of the really quite exceptional fic that appeared in the archive. So I am stoked this time around!

1. I've had a sudden urge today to write something more for nest_of_spiders, so there may or may not be James/Lily fic coming up later tonight depending on whether James co-operates or not, otherwise it'll show up next week.

2. Christmas exchange season is beginning to be upon us, hurrah! We'll see in time how many I end up signing up for, but sign-ups for fem_exchange are now on, which I am very, very tempted by.

3. I'm offline until Monday, just in case anyone needs to get hold of me in the interim, but I think I'm up to speed on everything except one beta, who I must email, actually. *makes mental note*

4. So I finished watching Firefly recently, and am wholly infatuated with it all and shall be acquiring a Serenity DVD forthwith. In the meantime, I was wondering if anyone had any fic recs? Actually, I'm curious, anyone who's passed through that fandom, what ships etc do people write, anyway? There are, after all, a fair few to choose from. I've found that I've ended up shipping Kaylee with just about everybody, so if anyone knew of some good Kaylee fic of any flavour, that would be fab - or anything else, for that matter!

5. The postwar fic I'm working on is now a little less embryonic, but I sense I'm going to run into all sorts of problems, because this is rapidly turning into the sort of thing I don't usually write.

See, I have so many interlinking ideas on things I want to write about set in the first couple of years after Deathly Hallows that it seems logical to merge them all. But this takes me into hitherto uncharted territory, namely a longer story that probably won't turn out as a one-shot. However. Knowing me, I'm a bit worried about to best work that, because I know that a) I am not very good at plotting in advance, and will often get to end of a story and have to go back and tweak all that's come before, but also that b) I probably do not have the stamina to work on something that long all by myself, and would probably be better motivated if I posted it as a WIP.

So, hmm. People who have gone down the WIP route, fancy telling me a bit about that? How do you find that works for you, what keeps you going in a timely fashion, etc? In the meantime I shall be plodding along, although how I've ended up with Minerva as the POV character for the first scene when I didn't even realise she was going to be in this story much is a bit of a mystery.