Arduinna

Still sorting away at the zines (it takes a while - I'm a packrat, it's hard to let things go!). Tonight was sorting through Pros printouts - circuit stories I'd copied (or printed off, if I got them via Proslib) and put in binders. I'd actually done a purge of these five years ago as well, clearing out a lot of the random stuff I'd kept. But I still had a pile left.

Some of them were easy to put into the recycling bag, because they're online now - Of Tethered Goats and Tigers, Rediscovered in a Graveyard, Suitable Gravity. There are a few that aren't online (or that I only have txt files for) that I can't quite bring myself to recycle - The Die Is Cast; Kind Hearts; a whole slew of Meg Lewtan historicals that I adore for their unabashed, unashamed wallowiness.

Then I found a whole stack of loose paper, and thought I'd missed something in the first round of purging - this had to be about 25 stories that I'd meant to recycle.

Except not so much. It was a two-inch, two-pound, double-sided stack of a single story: Waiting to Fuck Fall.

I didn't even remember that I had this; I know I never ordered it through the Circuit Library, never made my own copy. And this copy looks like it was created at different times - different paper, different toner quality, etc. I think I inherited it from the_shoshanna when she moved to Canada. (Shoshanna, do you remember? Was this yours?)

I never read it on paper; I wasn't kidding about the two inches and the two pounds. That was a lot of loose paper to contend with, and I just never got up the gumption, especially since I'd largely begun drifting away from Pros. I did eventually read it - online, when it got put up a year or two back. (Yeah, never think to yourself, "Oh, I know it's long, but maybe just the first few paragraphs to see what it's like, and then someday I'll get around to the whole thing..." unless you're willing to lose an entire weekend -- it's 350,000 words.)

Thing is, I'm never going to read this paper copy. It's loose, the quality isn't great in many places, it's hard to hold and read; I like paperback-sized things for reading these days (and preferably nice clear print). If I ever want to read it offline, I'll put it on my Kindle, where it will weigh a few ounces and fit neatly in my hand, and where the cat can't accidentally destroy the pagination by chasing a dust mote across it, and where I can resize the font when my eyes get tired.

I should recycle it.

But. What a piece of Pros history, this cobbled-together printout, passed from fan to fan! Maybe I should put it in the donate pile. (Although then some poor archivist will have to deal with it. *g*)

I am awash in nostalgia right now. I'm sorting through some old zines with an eye to selling and/or donating a bunch of them, and came across my copy of Twogether, the Due South zine that was the sequel to Two, both put out by IIBNF Press.

Due South was my first real zine fandom, such as it was; my first zines were ST:TOS, but I only had a handful, bought used out of a box at a dealer's room at an SF convention back in the mid-80s.

But after I got online and found FK fandom (omg people other than me watched FK! and taped it! and talked about it! *\o/*), I found out about DS fandom. I'd been watching DS since the pilot movie, and loved it, and was over the moon to realize it had a fandom. It even had a slash fandom!

It even had slash ZINES. omg.

So somewhere around 1995, I ordered my first-ever brand-new zine. I'm pretty sure it was Cry Wolf, from Ann O'Neill in England. I had to wrap up my cash very carefully to mail it off, and I had no idea if it'd made it until a month or two later, when suddenly there was a package for me, with a digest-sized zine full of Fraser/Ray stories. A (tiny) book of Fraser/Ray stories! It was to swoon.

I was hooked. I bought the next Cry Wolf, and two volumes of Pack Mates, all from England, and hey all of a sudden, I was a real zine fan! I had a collection.

And then Bernice advertised Two, and I bought it, and wow. It was amazing. Twice as thick as the Pack Mates zines, beautifully laid out, chock full of stories, like my old ST zines. I was still very much in my fannish honeymoon phase, and read pretty much anything and thought it was all good, but my memory of that zine is that it was aces. I mean - how can a zine with fuzzy stickers of moose in it not be awesome? (I'm not kidding. Random fuzzy stickers. I loved that zine so much.)

It even inspired me to write my first-ever LOC to a zine; I'd sent comments to online writers before, but I'd learned that part of the deal with zines was that if you read one, you were supposed to send a LOC. So after I finished it, I wrote... the stupidest LOC ever. *g* I had no idea what I was doing!

And it's not that I remember writing the stupidest LOC ever; I'd completely forgotten that I LOCed the zine, and if I had remembered, I probably would have thought that I wrote something reasonably coherent and useful.

But (here's where I tie in the first paragraph) tonight, when I looked at my copy of Twogether - the sequel to Two, remember? - I flipped through it to the back, where the letters of comment were, and there's my name. omg. (I had the same omg reaction when I got the zine, thinking back; for some reason, I hadn't expected the letters to be printed. *facepalm* I'd thought Bernice would just pass the feedback along to the authors. Total newbie, me.)

None of which is what triggered this post.

What triggered this post was looking at the other letters, and having a jawdrop moment. See, some of the names in there I remember from back then. Most I don't. Three in particular, I don't.

One right after the other, I saw letters from sakana17, sherrold, and movies_michelle -- all women I became friends with a few years later via other fandom means, and whom I'm still friends with. (*waves!*) And there we all were, sitting in the same LOC column together in 1997, in a zine printed in Australia and shipped halfway 'round the world.

I really love seeing how far back fannish connections actually go. <3

(Also, man, DS was some kind of mega-vector. Freakish.)

A couple of weeks ago, paian linked to a nifty little greasemonkey script that has made Dreamwidth so much more usable for me, I can't even tell you. The script is attached to your computer, not your account, so you don't have to be logged in to DW to make it work.

It's here: Dynamic and persistant DW reading/network page expand/collapse/hide.

If you're on Firefox and you have Greasemonkey installed, what this does is add two things to the subject line on each post you see: (-) (x) . That's it. They are WONDERFUL.

If you click the (-), the post you're looking at shrinks down to just the subject line and the comment count/reply links line. (You also then get a (+) in the subject line, for if you want to re-expand it.)

If you click the (x), the post you're looking at vanishes utterly, and the space where it was closes up so you don't see any gaps between posts.

Whatever you click stays clicked no matter what page you're on; if you collapse a post on your Reading page and go to that person's journal, the post is collapsed there, too. It's also collapsed if it shows up on your Network page. Likewise for anything you hide completely; it's gone everywhere. Really freaking handy for NSFW posts that scroll by at work that you don't want accidentally showing up again!

If you hide something and you want to unhide it, you just go to Tools | Greasemonkey | User script commands | Clear hidden entry values, and boom, you've got your hidden entries back. (You can also clear your collapse/expand entry values).

( Here, have some screencaps )

One of the things I have always disliked about LJ-type journaling is the lack of control over what I see; I want to be able to mark things as read, and delete them if I don't want them, and flag them to go back to later. This doesn't let you flag things, but with this I can finally see at a glance what entries are new, and I can get rid of ones that I just don't want to see.

It makes the Reading and Network pages so much cleaner, and so much easier to keep track of. <3

I've been poking around Dreamwidth for a couple of weeks now, looking for communities, and figured this would be a good Friday to start sharing the wealth. And since I've been happily catching up on the last few eps of Burn Notice*, here, have some comms:

bn_sparks - adult fanfic, both het and slash

burn_notice - discussion

burn_notice_fic - all genres, all ratings

burn_notice_graphics - fanart and graphics

winter_deaddrop - prompt-based flashfic comm

Some of these aren't very active yet, but hopefully if more people are interested that will change. (And that Fanlore entry I linked up there could use some love, too, now that I look at it...)

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Follow Friday (followfriday): Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die". Just introduce us to some new things to read. You can see all the entries on DW that have been tagged Follow Friday here.

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* I'm not all the way caught up yet! Please don't spoil me for the final two eps of s3; I'm watching those this weekend. TYK!

God, season 16? Seriously? I remember when we expected it to be cancelled every year, and now there's like, three months between seasons. (Also, the racers traveled uphill both ways, in the snow. In Alaska. By themselves. Poor Guidos.)

My love for TAR isn't as intense as it used to be, but I've been enjoying it again for the past few seasons. This season there are no actual assholes that I've noticed, which is really nice. Looking at the field right now, there are only a few teams I would rather didn't make it to the final four, but that's mostly because there are a few teams I hope really do. I'm not actively rooting against anyone, which is sort of refreshing.

Random observations on this week's episode:

( spoilers ahoy )

Author names have been revealed, so it must be time to post. *g* In order: What I got, what else I'm reccing, and what I wrote.

First up, thank you so much to eotu for my lovely Yuletide gift, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Assignment! It's I Spy, a missing scene for the episode The Seventh Captain, and I love it. *hugs story*

The ep moves very quickly from Scotty being captured and nearly killed (rescued by Kelly, yay!) to him being fairly light-hearted the next day; eotu pulls that back a bit and shows how he got back to that even-keeled place. Which, of course, is all due to his partnership with Kelly, and how they are just always there for each other, and which made me really happy to read. She gave me the Scotty and Kelly I love so much, and that interlude is now canon for that ep in my head.

So that is my first and most important rec! (Which I have just realized I didn't bookmark on AO3 because bookmarks weren't working well that first day, so I have just rectified that.)

More recs are available at my AO3 bookmarks; I'll be adding to these as I keep reading, because wow, is a week not long enough anymore. I don't even know how much more of the archive I have to go through, but it's a lot. *g* At the moment, there are recs in I Spy, Dark Is Rising, Fairy Tales, Anthropomorfic, Dresden Files (tv), MacGyver, Belgariad/Mallorean, the Fire Dancer series by Ann Maxwell, Victor/Victoria, Leverage, White Collar, Invisible Man, and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.

(Note: I haven't read all the stories in all those fandoms - I've been dipping in and out, and have read maybe 2 Madness stories so far on top of that. There are likely to be more all over the place. God, I love the bookmarking feature.)

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And now, for the story I wrote:

Beatriz (on AO3), for galerian_ash
Fandom: Gunmen *
Slash - Cole Parker/Dani Servigo
5,228 words
Rating: teen and up
* It's a mid-'90s action flick starring Christopher Lambert and Mario Van Peebles, about two men on opposite sides who eventually wind up (crankily) working together, then protecting each other, then helping each other, then sailing off together into the sunset sunrise while the soundtrack over them sings about how there's nothing wrong with being in love with someone. No, seriously.

I had so much fun with this. I signed up to write it because I've loved this movie for ages, and I've always wanted to see fic for it. Then I was looking through DYW letters before assignments went out, as you do, and stumbled across galerian_ash's request, and had this happy little moment of "that could be my assignment! I could totally write that!"

And then assignments came, and that was my assignment! \o/ Most years I get an assignment from a recipient who wants something a little different than my take on things, which is great because it lets me stretch; this was one of the years where we were totally in sync, which is great because it lets me just sink into the source. So I found my old VHS tape, and I ordered a DVD copy so I didn't completely destroy my tape, and I started watching. And watching. And watching. I was right, I really do love this movie. *g*

My one regret, if you can call it that, is that I had to skip about half my notes, which consisted of all the ways in which Cole (Mario Van Peebles) is gorgeous; I had all these scraps of lines in my head about that, because I really like looking at Cole. But then I started writing, and realized I was solidly inside Cole's head, and wasn't budging. Which meant that all of that description was useless, alas. But I like being inside his head, too, so it's all worth it.

So yay, another fabulous Yuletide, all around!

Thank you so much! The thought of a story in any of these fandoms is already making me happy. Whatever you want to do with them, I'm already grateful, and the happier you are with what you write, the happier I'll be reading it. If you have an idea that you're itching to write, go for it!

If you want more information about my requests, though, read on - but please don't worry if your ideas go in a different direction. Optional details are optional! As long as it's for one of these fandoms, and uses the characters, you totally win at Yuletide. \o/

( my fic tastes )

( why I love these fandoms )

If you're stalking my LJ or delicious for hints about me, my apologies - I never post much, and this year in particular I've been quiet in both places. But honestly, I adore all these fandoms, and will be happy with absolutely anything you write, as long as you enjoy writing it.

And thank you, again!!

Once again this year, I am barely halfway through the archive for the fandoms I know, so once again, recs aren't going to happen for a while.

But I must rec the fabulous story I got:

But a Dream, by Cori Lannam.

It's Crusoe, and it is the very first Crusoe story I had ever even seen, much less read, and it is so good! \o/

I'm not sure how to describe this without spoiling it; it starts with Crusoe waking up hurt and confused, and that confusion is crucial to the story. But Cori nailed everything I love about the show, in a way that I was not expecting at all, and I am flappy-handed with joy about the entire thing.

I admit, it probably won't make much sense if you haven't seen the series, but that should just provide incentive to go watch this show, which is incredibly fun.

(I can't believe this wasn't one of Yuletide's big fandoms this year, or that it isn't this year's hot new slash fandom [gen, too, but this is a show slashers should be going nuts over] -- two hot men, both smart and insanely competent, wonderful complements to each other, running around having adventures on a tropical island together. And living together in a treehouse, and utterly devoted to one another, but with plenty of room for arguments and misunderstandings because they're also very different. And with tons of fascinating backstory that's being spooled out a little bit at a time, to boot. And h/c all over the damn place. And banter and snark and teasing. And regular influxes of people who show up to make trouble before they go away again. Seriously, go watch this show! If you're in the US, all the episodes are on Hulu. If you're not in the US, I'm sure all the episodes are in the usual places. *g*)

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And I wrote a story, too, for Thea M, who requested Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.

The Golden Afternoon
Gen, PG
~3,400 words
Summary: An autumn day in the woods with Caine and Peter.

It's also up on my site. therienne and llwyden betaed for me, and made the story much better than it was. Thanks, guys!

I had huge amounts of fun rewatching the show to get the voices back in my head properly; it's all about the emotion and people's relationships with each other, with regular forays into danger, fights, and chases to keep things moving.

I was a little nervous because Thea wanted Pop in her story, and I'd never written him; the little dabbling I did ten years ago (... omg, *ten years ago*) was all Peter/Kermit. So of course I wound up writing the entire thing from Pop's POV -- because once I got inside his head, it all just flowed from there. Bizarre speech patterns and all.

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Once I recover from the slight burnout of trying to read everything before the reveal, I'll get back to going through the fandoms I know and start pulling an actual set of recs together. Meanwhile, I'm tagging my favorites on delicious.

I've been planning to add vid recs to my rec site for a couple of years now. The problem is, there are so many great vids that I kept feeling like I was leaving too many out.

I'm still leaving too many out -- vids, fandoms, you name it -- but it's at the point where if I don't suck it up and post these, they're going to languish on my harddrive forever. Better to rec some than none, right? So here are 107 vid recs in over 50 fandoms. (... yeah, I know.)

Most of my connection to the vid community these days is through Vividcon, so these tend to be slanted toward vids and vidders that I've come across there.

All of the recs in one place:

What’s New: Vidrecs

Recs by fandom:

Angel the Series
(2 recs)

Astro Boy
(1 rec)

Babylon 5
(2 recs)

Batman (tv)
(1 rec)

Battlestar Galactica
(4 recs)

Big Eden
(1 rec)

Boston Legal
(2 recs)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(4 recs)

Burn Notice
(1 rec)

Charlie Jade
(1 rec)

Dead or Alive 2
(1 rec)

Dead Poets Society
(1 rec)

Dead Zone
(4 recs)

Dexter
(2 recs)

Doctor Who
(5 recs)

Dune
(1 rec)

Due South
(1 rec)

Equilibrium
(1 rec)

Farscape
(3 recs)

Flyboys
(1 rec)

Hairspray
(1 rec)

Happy Feet
(1 rec)

Hercules: the Legendary Journeys
(2 recs)

Heroes
(4 recs)

Highlander
(2 recs)

Holding Out For A Hero
(2 recs)

Homicide: Life on the Streets
(1 rec)

House
(1 rec)

Hustle
(1 rec)

Indiana Jones
(1 rec)

Life
(2 recs)

Life on Mars
(2 recs)

Lord of the Rings
(1 rec)

Loving Annabelle
(1 rec)

The Matrix
(1 rec)

Miracles
(1 rec)

Once a Thief
(1 rec)

Pan's Labyrinth
(1 rec)

Peackemakers
(1 rec)

The Persuaders
(1 rec)

The Professionals
(2 recs)

Robin of Sherwood
(1 rec)

The Sentinel
(1 rec)

Sherlock Holmes
(1 rec)

The Shield
(1 rec)

Silence of the Lambs
(1 rec)

Stargate Atlantis
(10 recs)

Stargate SG-1
(12 rec)

Torchwood
(2 recs)

Wiseguy
(1 rec)

Xena Warrior Princess
(1 rec)

X-Files
(2 recs)

Multifandom
(8 recs)

Please let me know if there are any problems with links, etc.

Title: Sumer Is Icumin In
Author: Arduinna
Fandom: Anthropomorfic
Pairing: Ice/Water
Prompt: summer


Notes: Written for oxoniensis's Porn Battle VI - The Undiscovered Country. I saw the prompt and this pretty much instantly sprang to mind, so I couldn't resist.

You can read the story over there, or on my website, or click the cut to read it here.

( Sumer Is Icumin In )

In a fit of... something, I signed up for Sweet Charity this time around. The auction is now live, with some seriously cool stuff up for grabs from 146 different people.

I'm offering to write a 1,000-word-minimum gen or slash story in any of a bunch of fandoms, including Boy Meets World, Dead Zone (through s3), Dresden Files (tv), due South (s1-2 only), Invisible Man, I Spy, MASH, Night Court, Peacemakers, The Persuaders, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Tin Man. (Specific pairings are listed in my info on the auction.) There are other fandoms (& pairings) I may be willing to give a shot, but didn't want to commit to cold -- feel free to ask if you want to know about a particular fandom, or about a crossover.

The auction's running through March 28th, 11:59pm GMT. It's all for a really good cause (RAINN, again -- the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network), and there's something there for everyone. Go check it out!

Dear Yuletide writer,

Thank you so much! I've been refreshing the fandoms list and bouncing at the sight of gold numbers next to all of my requests, and I'm so happy you're writing one of them!

My prompts were a little vague, partly because I love surprises -- so it almost never occurs to me to think "what kind of story do I want to get?" -- and partly because I didn't want to make you feel obligated to meet any requirements. Seriously, whatever you want to write is great, and the happier you are with what you write, the happier I'll be reading it. If you have an idea that you're itching to write, go for it!

If you want or need more info, though:

( my fic tastes )

( why I love these fandoms )

And thank you, again!!