the_rck

( Bosch, Pseudonymous. Bad Magic )

( Bosch, Pseudonymous. BAD Luck )

( Chi-chi-chimaera (gestalt1), gestalt1. Twin Sunrise )

( Collins, Suzanne. Gregor the Overlander )

( Cooper, Susan. The Dark Is Rising )

( DarthNickels. The Exiled )

( Greenwood, Kerry. Cocaine Blues )

( Krentz, Jayne Ann. Promise Not to Tell )

( Lorata. Impossible Magic )

( Mass, Wendy. The Candymakers )

( McGuire, Seanan. Beneath the Sugar Sky )

( Millard, Candice. Hero of the Empire )

( Proud Knight, Fair Lady )

( Sunstone 2 )

( Tomaszewski, Z.G. All Things Dusk )

( Tryslora. The Fires of the Abyss )

( The Wallflower 21-27 )

( Willingham, Katie. Unlikely Designs )


Started but not finished:
( Armitage, Simon. The Unaccompanied )

( Goldie Vance 1 )

( Gallagher, Tess. Moon Crossing Bridge )

( Harrison, Leslie. The Book of Endings )

I have no idea if anyone will care about any of this, but why not ask?

For wipbigbang, I’m considering the following WIP. The minimum length for the challenge is 7500 words. These are the stories I’ve started that I think could go that long without getting so very long that I can’t finish them by the deadline. They’re all things I’m happy to think about writing and have enjoyed so far.

I’m willing to share the bits I’ve written of these stories if anyone’s interested. There’s a Narnia story (darkfic, child abuse issues), a DCU story (mangling of canon, darkfic, consent issues, moral compromises), a Chronicles of Amber story (mangling of canon, possible consent issues, serious opportunities for me to muck up gender identity and non-identity issues), and three Weiss Kreuz stories (one darkfic and two PWP).

I’m not sure that I’ll act on whatever feedback (if any) I get. I’ve already talked to a couple of friends who… Well, the story one liked, the other loathed. The story the second one liked most, the first one loathed. So, yeah. Scott has declined to offer an opinion. He doesn’t read darkfic or smutty fic, so none of this appeals to him.

Sign ups close on the 3rd, so I’m running out of time, and I was having trouble deciding even before stress started making my brain dribble out my ears.

( The possibilities )

Yea! I have finally finished coming up with answers of some sort to the questions posed to me about my fic in that meme a while back. I apologize for the delay.

rosielotrfan asked about Covenant, my Harry Potter/Sandman/xxxHOLIC crossover.

1. What was my inspiration for this fic? How did it come to me?

When I write, I tend to find a first line and sort of wander from there. I wrote this one for Fandom Stocking 2008 and spun it off from a fragment I'd already written because the recipient's fandoms seemed to fit. This story addressed a plot hole that would be in Auguries of Innocence if I carried it forward (and I have for at least a few chapters in the years since).

I still have no idea why I put Morpheus in the story. I don't actually like the Sandman comics at all. The characters interested me, but I couldn't deal with the horrific elements. Morpheus just seemed to fit here and to be necessary.

At any rate, I started with the idea of Luna needing a wish. I didn't think that she'd likely be in a position to visit Japan, but Yuuko's store doesn't seem to exist entirely in the physical world, and that led to the entrance through the dream realm. I didn't actually know when I started the story how the characters would interact. Luna kept surprising me.

I don't think I quite got Luna's wish right, not for the other work I have in mind, but this will do.

7. Were there any major decisions I made about the fic that could have made it go a whole different direction?

I think the biggest decision I made was to try to make this story stand on its own. There are a few bits— mostly references to Draco— that make sense only when one knows that this is a canon divergent AU. I could have made the AU elements stronger, more obvious. I think, though, that the story works better kind of vaguely unanchored.

I do think, too, that Morpheus adds something, possibly context, that doesn’t come from Luna and Yuuko interacting with each other. If I’d omitted him, there are a lot of things that would have been left unsaid. So, I guess, I do know why Morpheus is in the story.

8. Was there anything I only learned about the fic after I had finished it? (themes, motifs, symbolism, etc)

I’m not actually sure. I think there are more things that I discovered as I wrote. I tend to wander as I write and discover both the details and the shape of the story as I go. I don’t generally analyze my stories much after the fact. I end up looking at things and being surprised that the bits all fit together when I didn’t plan how they would.

14. If I were to write a sequel to this fic, what would it be about?

I’ve already written six and a half chapters (about 40000 words) of sequel to this. I have no idea how long that story will end up being or where it will end up going. I’m still trying to construct a plan for the plot. I’ve gotten as far as I have simply by writing and discovering things like "Oh. That character is a villain. I didn’t know that."

It is a dark, canon divergent AU in which Draco succeeded in killing Dumbledore during sixth year. Things go more than a bit sideways from there. The story picks up after Harry defeats Voldemort (six or seven years after Dumbledore’s death), but pretty much everyone has gotten a lot darker than in the canonical timeline. Draco and Luna are my main point of view characters, and they’re both more than a little, um, at an angle to reality as everyone else sees it. That makes writing them challenging but also a lot of fun.

This is the story I was working on when this year went pear shaped.



lunabee34 asked about Faded Colors, my Jadis centric Narnia backstory.

3. What’s the part of the fic I’m most proud of?

I wanted very much to make Jadis a person. As Lewis wrote her, she’s a single note character, and she doesn’t have much of a past. He establishes that she did something really and truly terrible and doesn’t regret it all, but he doesn’t give her the complexities that would explain why she would become a person who would do that. I didn’t want to assume that she was born evil and so doomed from the start. I also didn’t want to minimize the terrible things that she does in canon.

I thought the scene where Aslan offers Jadis redemption was key. All of her life built toward her being the sort of person who would rather destroy than share, who would rather suffer than humble herself or admit to any error.



maramcreates asked about Fulcrum.

7. Were there any major decisions I made about the fic that could have made it go a whole different direction?

This was a Yuletide fic. My recipient said that they were definitely interested in a crossover between Zenna Henderson’s People stories and some other fandom. They didn’t list the fandoms that they had in mind, but they had a few fandoms listed in their interests on their LJ profile. My suspicion is that they were thinking of a crossover with Smallville, but that’s not a canon I knew much about. Doctor Who on the other hand… Well, I knew a fair amount about that. I don’t recall if there were other fandoms listed that might have worked for the crossover, but using a different fandom would have changed things vastly.

I had to decide which Doctors to use. I couldn’t tell from my recipient’s LJ which was their preferred Doctor, so I went with the ones I knew best, the Seventh and the Fourth. I’d seen the bits of new Who that were available up to that point, but I hadn’t really internalized them enough to see Nine (was Ten around yet when I wrote this? I don’t remember) as really being the Doctor. At any rate, given that every Doctor has a different personality, this story would have gone differently with different Doctors.

I’m not sure that the other decisions I recall would have made a big difference— I decided which state the story took place in, but I don’t think that mattered too much. I decided that I wanted Melodye there because I thought that Karen/Melodye was a real possibility even if I didn’t end up doing more than think about it.

11. If I were to rewrite this fic, what would I change?

I think I’d use italics a bit less. I’m trying to get away from doing that these days.

Also, we know a lot more about the backstory for new Who now, and I think that that would have an impact on the plot. I was relying more on old Who canon than on new, but I was playing with the idea that this might be what the Doctor did to destroy Gallifrey, that, by letting the People establish themselves on Earth and not just on the New Home, he altered history enough that Gallifrey didn’t come into being the way it had in his personal history.

14. If I were to write a sequel to this fic, what would it be about?

I would like to figure out what happened on the other occasions when Karen met the Doctor, and I’d like to expand on Karen’s relationship with Melodye. This is the closest I’ve come to writing a f/f romance, and it’s just barely implied. I mean, I think that one can see it that way if one’s paying attention, but it’s not even stated, so it’s equally possible to read it as 'merely' a close friendship. I’m not sure that more romance would have fit the story since the focus was elsewhere, but… Yeah. Karen and Melodye deserve more attention. I’m curious as to what Karen’s family would have thought. I like to think that the People would be open to same sex relationships. I don’t know that Zenna Henderson ever thought about it, but the sort of folks she wrote the People as being ought to welcome love in all non-abusive forms.

I've started reading through my remixee's fics. The task seems overwhelming because there are so many of them in the fandom we matched on. I'm also not sure I have a good grasp of the character they favor most, and I no longer have ready access to canon (It's a big fandom, so I'm sure there has to be a wiki). They also have a bias toward fluff that I will probably end up subverting simply because I'm incapable of fluff. I did look at the three fics they have in another common fandom, and I really liked one of those, but it's been remixed before by someone else, so I would rather find something else to remix.

I actually hope I matched to be remixed in Narnia and not in Weiss Kreuz. I feel like my Weiss stories have been very thoroughly picked over, so that someone might have a hard time finding a story they liked that hadn't been remixed already. I wouldn't mind a second remix of the same story, of course. If there's one thing I know about Remix, it's that no two people write the same story, not even when they start from the same point. But there were only two or three people offering to remix Weiss Kreuz, and they're likely to be people who've remixed my work before. I'd think they'd want a different challenge.

I slept later this morning than I intended to. It was after 10:00 when I got up. That means that I'm squishing together when I take my morning meds and when I take my lunch meds because we're going to a birthday party at 1:30.

The LJ and DW Metanews posts went up over night. I did the Tumblr post because the other moderator was having issues with a slow connection and couldn't get Tumblr to load. There were a couple of html errors in the post that I've fixed on DW and LJ (I haven't the slightest clue how to fix them on Tumblr). Both were my errors, but I think two errors is pretty good in thirty pages of links.

We do have templates for how to lay out the links, and if I used those, I wouldn't make most of these mistakes, but going back and forth to get the templates takes so long that it would probably double the time I take writing up a link. I'd rather just type from scratch and deal with the occasional error.

I'm torn as to whether I want to write after we get back from the party or whether I want to get started on link finding so that it's not quite as hectic Monday and Tuesday. Writing is definitely tempting. I keep not doing it, and I'd really like to get this chapter moving. On the other hand, the link finding has to be done at some point.

I am thinking to sign up for Remix this year simply because I love the challenge of it. I qualify in Weiss Kreuz and Narnia, so it should be relatively straightforward to find someone to write for me. I'm not sure what to offer-- They're opening things up to any fandom in the tagset this year. I'm not sure how that will work in terms of knowing what to offer since that really depends on what fandoms people want to be remixed in. It would be very easy to offer a bunch of fandoms that nobody's asking for, but at the same time, even a very tiny fandom might be in someone's sign up. I don't know. I think they need a nomination period of some sort.

I have pretty much promised to offer to remix Naruto and Narnia. I don't know what else makes sense for me. I don't feel like I have to know a fandom in as much detail to remix it as I do to write from scratch.

We apparently just had an earthquake. I didn't notice, but Scott and Cordelia both did.

I didn't do any metanews work yesterday which is unusual for me for a Sunday and means a lot more time to be spent today and tomorrow. I had every intention of getting to at least the Hugo links, if not the 221B Con links, yesterday, but I fell into a long fic and didn't emerge for quite some time. The fic wasn't spectacular, but it worked well for me. I shall have to come up with something to say about it and leave a comment on it.

The big thrill yesterday is that someone made a podfic of one of my stories. The story in question is called "Job Interview," and it crosses Harry Potter with the Belgariad, having Minerva McGonagall interviewing Polgara for the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. The story's pretty short, so the podfic runs under five minutes. I haven't listened to it yet because there were too many noisy distractions yesterday. I did leave the creator a comment saying how thrilled I am, though, and I do plan to listen. I've never listened to a podfic before, though, so I'm not sure I'll have much to say about it. I'm also a little afraid that hearing my own words read aloud will end up making me uncomfortable. In case anybody's interested in taking a listen, the podfic is here.

Cordelia had a Girl Scouts thing yesterday from 11:00 until 2:00. Her troop made food for their school's Brownie troop. The troop leader called it a brunch, but, given that they didn't serve food until 1:00, I'm not sure the word's appropriate. Cordelia apparently spent her time making pancakes. She says, unlike when she made pancakes last summer while her troop was camping, she didn't burn any, and that the Brownies ate a lot of them. I thought the event ran until 3:00 because the schedule the troop leader had sent out said that it did, but apparently all of the Brownies went home earlier than expected. Cordelia called at 2:00, wondering why Scott wasn't there to pick her up.

Scott took the library bag and, after picking Cordelia up from Girl Scouts, headed to the library. I had about ten things waiting, mostly CDs. I forgot to tell him that I had an interlibrary loan item which had to be picked up at the front desk, but fortunately, I remembered and was able to call him before they'd actually left the library entirely. They were in the parking lot, heading for the car, when I reached Scott.

Scott and I finished the DVD of Leverage that we were working on. It's the third of season 5. We weren't really impressed by any of the episodes on it. They weren't terrible; they just weren't up to what we expect from the show. I never gave my full attention to any of them and didn't really feel like I missed anything which is sad. Hopefully, the final DVD will be better.

I ended up taking a bath last night. I thought about a shower because I really do prefer those, but I decided to play it safe. Maybe I'll try a shower again on Wednesday. The bath was okay except for the getting out of the tub part. That required kneeling for a moment, and my ankle really hated that. I could have asked Scott for help again, I suppose, but I really wanted to do it myself if I could.

We have enough leftover chicken to feed me and Cordelia tonight, while Scott's working late. Scott didn't end up doing as much cooking over the weekend as he originally planned, so he will probably have to cook tomorrow, and there may not be leftovers for when he works late on Thursday. I don't know. We did have a bit of panic when it appeared that the lid to our steamer had vanished, but I see that it's on the counter now with the rest of the steamer, so Scott must have found it later on. We pretty much don't use anything else to make vegetables, so losing part of the dratted thing would have been a real problem. I'm not even sure Scott remembers where he bought this one.

A question Cordelia asked me the other day (about what the K rating means) leads me to believe that she's ventured into the waters at fanfiction.net. She admitted that she's interested in fic for The Heroes of Olympus series as a way to satisfy her craving for more canon while she waits for the fifth book to come out in October. I'm not sure how she happened on fanfiction.net; I don't suppose it's at all hard to find, though.

I'm debating whether or not I should point her at AO3 as another source of fic. She might be better off at fanfiction.net where the age of participants skews younger, and she might well reject AO3 just because I suggest it. No eleven year old wants to be following in her mother's footsteps on something like this. I'm not sure she knows that I post at fanfiction.net. At least the stuff there is the least likely of my fics to freak her out, and, at either archive, I write in fandoms she doesn't know.

I'm not so concerned about whether or not she runs into smut. I suspect that she's still at an age where she won't be interested (I hope she's not squicked!) in most of it. She's been notably reluctant to let me talk to her about puberty and sex. If she is interested and does read it, well, we all have to start somewhere in sorting out good information from bad. I hope she'd be willing to talk to me about it, but I can't assume that she will.

Cordelia hates writing, so I don't think she'll start writing fic (I'd think it was great if she did). I wish I thought she'd be willing to talk to me about it. I wish, too, that I knew some people in that fandom who I could introduce her to. I think she'd love to talk about the books and the fic with other people who aren't me or Scott. She's really passionate about these books. She's read the first four several times each and is always pleased when her school friends share her interest.

Anybody know anything about The Heroes of Olympus fandom? She's not so interested in the Percy Jackson side of things, but she might be willing to start there.

I miss reading fanfic. I haven't really done it in a couple of years. As an example, I read very few Yuletide stories this year, and that was more than I read the year before. I've set myself a daily task on HabitRPG to read one Yuletide story a day. We'll see where that gets me.

I think that part of my problem is that the recent fandoms I know something about are all live action, either TV or movies. I have trouble reading fic for live action fandoms, especially romantic and/or explicit stuff. I'm too aware that the characters are portrayed by actors, and I can't separate the characters from the actors well enough to submerge in a story (RPF, unless it's about historical figures at least fifty years dead, creeps me out. I can't deal with it).

Another problem is that, right now, I mostly want to read gen. Sorting that out from the shippy stuff is a challenge that I haven't felt up to in recent months. I suppose I should learn how to filter for it on AO3. I'm not against having a pairing in the background. I just don't want the story to be about the pairing.

I think I need to try wandering around in fandoms I know nothing about. Or maybe I should look at old fandoms. I haven't been keeping up with anything but Weiss Kreuz, and I haven't been reading much of anything in that. So perhaps the difficulty isn't simply not being able to find fic to read as much as it is not being motivated to look for fic to read. I don't know.

What fandoms have you been reading? Do you know any fandoms that are good places to find gen fic?

I'm seriously considering trying the Ficfinishing community. I have no idea how well I'd fare with the process, but something with some structure that gives me an external deadline might well help. I've asked and been told that it's okay to do a chunk of an epic rather than trying to complete a shorter piece.

The biggest difficulty is that none of my works in progress (apart from the Harry Potter AU) are in qualifying fandoms. I voted for The Pretender, and that may tip it into qualifying, but my other nominees are new to the list and need four to six more interested parties voting for them.

Voting for a fandom isn't an absolute commitment to working with the community later, but the community works better if most of the people who vote do actually participate later, as writers or as first readers or cheerleaders or in some capacity.

I'm very interested in getting Weiss Kreuz qualified. I'd also like to see Ranma 1/2 there. Those are the two fandoms in which I have multiple plot bunnies or works in progress. If you think it might work for you, this is the entry for voting on fandoms. From what I understand, any fandom with more than five votes is near to qualifying. Most of mine have only my vote.

Anyone interested?

I have started a backup archive for my fic on DW. So far, I've formatted and posted few fics. I think I'm going to work by rating. All of the fics I've put up so far are G and PG rated, by chance at first and by intention now. Working my way up the ratings will give me a chance to figure out how to set an adult content warning (which looks easy enough but I haven't tried yet), the sort that gives a little warning when people come in following a link from elsewhere.

My higher rated fics are such that I don't want people hitting them without some sort of warning. Maybe I need to put extra space after the header information and before the body of the fic. That would help make sure that people can look at the warnings/labels without getting hit by the text immediately.

At any rate, I expect that getting my fics up will take at least two weeks, possibly two or three months. A lot depends on how much time I have for it. Putting in the tags for formatting is time consuming and irritating. I may be able to get at the source code for my documents*. I haven't tried that yet. I use a WYSIWYG interface for posting to my website (I use SeaMonkey), so I don't have easy access to the html.

I will be indexing and tagging everything as carefully as I can. I have more fics than I thought I did. They've accumulated so gradually. I also have four fics that I need to polish and post at my website. I keep putting those off.

If you're interested in my fic, you're welcome to follow the new journal. I'm still considering my website as my primary archive, but I plan to keep the journal up. I don't think I'll put my recs on the journal, however, because the work involved is way too much.

*Okay, tried that on a short fic. Cleaning it up would be more work than starting from the word processing file. I'm not going that way right now.