1. I got my Jump scans pretty much on time last night, and both Naruto and Bleach were pretty short, so that made up for the fact that Bakuman was super long. (Three pages were sketches of the characters' manga, and each page had four of the mini manga pages, so there were essentially nine pages extra to translate. Argh!)

Oh, speaking of Bakuman... ( Very vague spoilers, but mostly fail discussion. )

2. Brizzly seems pretty cool for using Twitter via the web (I always use the web interface anyway). One nice thing it does is it unpacks shortened links (which on Twitter is almost all of them). I think it's new yet, though, because it seems a little glitchy (even more so than Twitter, which is already plenty glitchy itself).

3. I love this Wondermark to death.

4. It got warm again yesterday (I knew I would jinx it!), but it wasn't bad (nto as muggy maybe) and it still got nice and cold at night.

5. anatsuno pointed me to this call for submissions to a supernatural gay erotica anthology. She was thinking of a story I actually hadn't written (helens78's Jude/Ewan vampire fic; not a surprising mistake, since like 90% or more of the Jude/Ewan fic out there is indeed written by me), but I do have a formerly-LotRiPS one with a ghost that might fit. It's more horror than erotica, despite containing sex, so I don't know. But it's also a story I've already origified (apparently I actually submitted it somewhere three years ago, according to the date on the file) so all I had to do was send it in. The #1 reason I don't try harder to get published is that looking for places to submit stuff is a huge pain in the ass, so the fact that the story was already ready to go, and ana did the work of finding the call for submissions for me made it easy. :D It's only $25-30 if it gets published, but like I said, I didn't have to do any work, and $25 is better than $0.

I don't feel like making an actual poll, and I suspect I wouldn't actually abide by the results anyway, but I am actually not under any sort of fic deadline at the moment and am not planning on doing any holiday fests (with the exception of trying to nab a Yuletide pinch hit) and I find myself with several partially-written fics open and waiting for me to work on them.

( Blathering + snippets )

Of course there are a million other snippets on my hard drive that I may or may not ever go back to, but these are the ones that are open and newish and thus have the highest chance of getting done. So what are your thoughts? Anything you're particularly interested in?

So I was poking about on queerlygen earlier, as one does when one is procrastinating writing one's remix (I do have an opening sentence, though!), and I thought I'd look back through my own fics and see what I had written that might qualify. My own definition of gen excludes non-canon pairings, so I don't have too many by that definition, but if I were to broaden the definiton to be stories about other than sex/romance/relationships, whether or not the people in them are in a non-canon relationship, I would have quite a few more.

Rest Stop (I Knew You When Remix)
Supernatural. No pairing. Dean is ftm. Sam and Dean do Sam and Dean type stuff like hunting and patching each other up after a hunt and having awkward conversations about things.

Morning Sunlight
Hikaru no Go. Hikaru/Akira. Hikaru thinks about Sai one morning while lying in bed with Akira.

Team Q
Harry Potter. Dean/Seamus. Dean and Seamus try to figure out what to do with their lives after leaving school and hit upon the idea of creating a queer superhero comic together.

Out of a Picture Book
Harry Potter. Dumbledore/Grindlewald. Just a little snapshot of Albus and Gellert and Ariana.

No Rules for This
Digimon. Daisuke/Ken. This is a little more relationship-focused than the others, but mostly it's about being a gay teen and trying to navigate things like Valentine's Day when the rules don't apply to you.

Our House
RPF. Jason Isaacs/Liam Neeson/Carrie-Anne Moss. Ficlets about parenting in a poly relationship.

Learning as You Go
RPF. Jude Law/Ewan McGregor. Ficlets about two guys raising a son together. Also includes one fic about having to explain to your kid that sometimes sex involves things that leave bruises, and that's okay. (I'm particularly fond of that one.)

I also have some Vampire Chronicles fics where Louis and Lestat are gay for each other while Lestat is obsessed with iPods or Dance Dance Revolution, while they receive odd souvenirs from Lestat's mother, and when Lestat accidentally kills David by reading Merrick to him and he and Louis set off on a cross-country trip to catch Anne Rice before any more innocent lives fall victim to the book's powers, in a parody of Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby.

I know it's considered a huge faux paus to say so in fandom, but I really think my writing is pretty awesome, and when I read over old stuff like this, I'm always impressed. Randomly, here are some other fics I read and thought were awesome while going through my old fics tonight.

Holidays
RPF. Jude Law/Ewan McGregor. Jude and Ewan meet as kids on holiday and then again later as adults.

Drawing his knees up, Jude wraps his arms around them. He wants to ask this boy why he hates school, and if it's because the other boys beat him up and call him queer and poof and Judy. Well, they wouldn't call him Judy, but they might call him some other girl's name.

No Explanation
LotRiPS. Dom/Elijah. Cyberpunkish ficlet where Elijah is obsessed with revisiting the time when he and Dom were still together.

Elijah flips the switch and leans back against the wall, breathes deep, eyes closed so he can't see himself disappear. The one time he'd looked, he'd ended up collapsed on the floor in a puddle of his own vomit, his hand and arm transparent in a way flesh and bone definitely shouldn't be. The technician on duty had fixed him up, no problem, but it's not something Elijah can easily forget. That doesn't stop him from using the machine, though. He just makes sure he closes his eyes when he gets in. He can still feel it, though, and sometimes that's enough to make him sick, leave him feeling nauseated on arrival.

Rude Awakening
Brokeback Mountain. Alma. A missing scene. Alma's reaction to seeing Ennis and Jack together.

She read Alma Jr. a story; Snow White was her favorite now and Alma'd been reading it every night for near on two weeks. Her voice didn't break and she didn't say don't you wait for your prince, 'cause he ain't comin', or other things a four-year-old wouldn't understand.

All but the Bitter Residue
Harry Potter. Sirius/Remus. In the days following Voldemort's defeat, Remus struggles to come to terms with betrayal and loss.

It's not til a few days later that he finally picks it up, muttering Reparo under his breath. He stuffs his wand back in his pocket and slides the photo out of its frame. It doesn't want to tear at first, but once he gets it started it rips straight down between Sirius and James. James is too busy making eyes at Lily to notice anything wrong, but Sirius looks startled for a moment before Remus crumples him up and tosses the scrap into the bin.

He puts the photo back in its frame and sets it on the bedside table. The Remus in the picture keeps laughing at Peter's joke, but his eyes are focused on the ragged edge where Sirius used to be.

These are not fics I would normally have picked out as favorites of mine. They're ones I'd kind of forgotten about, honestly, but reading over them brought back how much I really loved them (especially that last one).

I got my cliche_bingo card and posted an HTML version over here to keep it with my kink_bingo one.

I'm kind of meh about several squares, so I think like with kink bingo, I will probably just use them as prompts rather than trying to get a bingo. (Why did I have to get hypothermia and illness? I don't like H/C! And crossovers, gah. So not a fan of crossovers.)

I think with genderswap, I might take it literally rather than the bodyswapping fandom usually means. *already has an idea* There's several others I'm excited about, too, but I haven't really done too much thinking about it.

McShep Match and Remix definitely have priority right now. Remix is due on July 12th and Match is due on August 19th. I'm actually better set on Match, because I know what I'm doing and even have some of it written. Still not sure about Remix.

I also have a fic I'm in the middle of that I really would like to finish maybe this week sometime.

So I've been wibbling over my fic website for quite some time. I have almost everything on there now, except for some of the old Vampire Chronicles stuff, which never even made it onto my previous website because I'd kind of like to go over them and edit a bit first and that never seems to happen.

The only other stuff I was missing were two Judewan series, this_pastime and the Andy!verse, because I couldn't figure out how I wanted to organise them. Did I want to have separate entries for each fic, even though that would mean they were all scattered since this site is organised by posting date? Also they're all so short, so it's a pain to click through to a bunch of separate entries. The problem with posting each series as a single entry is that then I need a name for the series, which I don't have for the Andy!verse.

Anyway, tonight I finally got off my ass and added all the This Pastime stuff. I went ahead and did it one one page in the order written (except the last two fics are switched to give it a more solid ending). I'm not only pleased with the way it looks like that, but I'm also pleased with how it reads as a series. I did want to write more in that universe, but it was more filling in the blanks (or maybe writing some from Jude's POV) than continuing on. I'd always planned to leave it ambiguous and not have a traditional happy ending (I mean, this is me writing rentboy fic, so the chances of it being your typical Pretty Woman ending are pretty much none).

Now I just need to come up with a title for the Andy!verse and I'll be one step closer to having my website actually finished! (Of course the VC editing stuff is going to take longer, but I'm determined not to drag my heels on that too long.) I also may go through and redo how I have RPS listed, but that's just tweaking.

I didn't include any abandoned WiPs (which, you can consider pretty much anything I had in progress to be abandoned; sorry, but I doubt at this stage of the game I'll go back to anything) or any co-written fic (especially since all but two co-written fics are also abandoned WiPs), but other than that, that's all my fic in one place. Yay. :D


In other writing news, I mentioned this on DW, but didn't bother crossposting. I've signed up for kink_bingo and am planning on writing transfic for every square I fill.


Also mcshep_match signups are a week away!


Also, also I wrote 300 words tonight for a random_fic_is_random picture prompt.

There are some of my WiPs that I don't think I'll ever get back to, much as I wish I could, but I was poking around and remembered this, and I think that's one I'm actually going to try and finish, not least because I don't think it will be very long.

I'm also thinking about McShep Match coming up. I have several scraps of other stories on my hard drive and I'm thinking of working some or all of them together. Of course, I have to snag a prompt that I can make work for it, but hopefully that won't be a problem. I already know I want Team War. *can't wait for signups*

And when is Remix? I'm looking forward to that, too.

Hey. Writing. Maybe I can actually get some done? :D :D :D?

Reading this post about why people shouldn't watch Merlin (which really comes off more as sour grapes that people are leaving SGA, and I don't really have anything to say re: the discussion itself), as well as this comment in to one of the response posts, got me thinking about what draws me into a fandom in terms of writing.

( Warning: I am tired and don't even know if this is coherent. Mainly it's rambly. :p )

In other news, I'm kicking myself for not dating any of my old Vampire Chronicles fic. This was before I was posting fic to LJ, and the places I posted to no longer exist, and when I archived them on my website, I never thought to note the date they were written. But now I'm putting stuff on my new fic site, which is a Word Press blog, which has everything nicely in order by date, and I don't have any dates! I used to compulsively delete emails after a couple months back then, too, so I don't even have any correspondence that would help me out. D:

I've joined fan_workshop, a new writing comm that sounds like it could be fun. It looks like there are going to be a variety of activities: monthly discussion posts about various aspects of writing, writing prompts based on the themes of the discussions, and story critiques. So far the group is pretty small, so head on over if it seems like something that would interest you.

The first month's discussion topic is going to be outsider POV, which is not something I've thought about much. Not something I've read much, either. In fact, I think lavvyan's mcshep_match fic, Blink, may be the first outsider POV fic I've read. It's the only one that comes to mind, anyway.

fan_workshop is multi-fandom, btw.

And of course I've talked before about sga_talk. We could always use more members over there, and we could also use more fic submissions, so if you know of any fics you'd like to see discussed, just comment with them here. (If they're not your own fics, be sure to ask the authors first, as the comm requires author permission for all fics that are discussed.) The comm is perpetually low on femslash submissions, but submissions in other genres are always welcome as well.

Discussion of my fic We Cling to This and Claim the Best is currently ongoing.

Post the first line from your 25 most recent fanfics and try to find a pattern.

( Long! )

Well, first of all, I'm sad that to get twenty-five fics I had to go all the way back to April of last year. Gah. (Also that I haven't written anything this year since June, waah...)

But that aside, it was interesting looking at these altogether. It seems pretty obvious that I go for a statement of some sort most often, usually something that I hope is interesting enough to draw people in. Less often it's something descriptive. Even less often it's dialogue. (It seems like I used to start off more with dialogue than I do now, but I didn't go back far enough to really see.)

One thing I can say, I like all of these openings.

Okay, the option with the most votes was remix, so here we go (I do plan to do the others in a timely manner, though, but we'll see how that goes). All my remixes can be found here, but to simplify things for today, I'm just going to talk about the four I wrote for Remix Redux (I also wrote one for the LotRiPS Remix and one for the Fandum Mashup challenge Ruth and I ran a couple years back).

( Long! )

Reading some more on elfwreck's post and was prompted to comment again. There's a lot of condescension going around there, and implications that if you don't agree, you either don't know your own motives, or if you write for different reasons, your writing sucks and is more illegal than her way of doing things. So...I think I'm going to try really hard to stay away from anything to do with her from now on. Best for my blood pressure. :p

Anyway, I wanted to c&p my response here and expand upon it, because it actually made me think about some interesting things.

What I disagree with about her post is the idea that this is why it has to be fanfic. Almost nothing I write has to be fanfic (there are a few stories that are so completely tied to a canon plot point that they couldn't be rewritten as original fic, but those are few and far between; most of my stories deal with themes that are universal and not specific to one canon universe or character). If I decide to write it as fanfic, sure I make sure it's IC and works with canon, etc. etc. But I could also write it as original fiction. Or tell the same story in a different canon universe. And in each case I would make sure it worked for that scenario. But there is nothing that makes it have to be fanfic.

That's what I said, now ( to expand on it... )

I signed up for the Sweet Charity auction.

( Details of my offer )

I chose the last deadline possible, April 30th, so that should give me plenty of time to write.

Bidding starts tomorrow and runs through the 26th.

2007 was not a great year for me for writing. I posted at least one fic a month up through September (and there were several months where it was only one fic each), and nothing at all for the last three months of the year. 19 stories for a total of about 21,400 words. (And 2200 words of that was deliberate badfic! XD I include it because it was time spent writing, but...)

( Breakdown and rambling about what I wrote + resolutions for this year )

New Year's Resolutions
Well, I took a look at the NYRs and there was only one, for Yotsuba&!, I was interested in! But I'm very, very interested, so I might actually get around to doing it this year instead of just talking about it.

I was really excited at first, because I hadn't seen that she requested Torako, and I was thinking more Ena/Miura. But I am also down with Asagi/Torako, so. And of course Yotsuba herself would have to be a big part of it.

Also, damn, that's a lot of potential NYRs. It took me ages to read through the list.

( Rambling on the stories I wrote. )

The first and last lines of my ten most recent fics. Wow, I can't believe this covers three whole months. And I haven't written anything in October. Bah. :(

( July through September... )