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25 Days of Writing: Day 15

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

Oh, summaries. Definitely. Sometimes even a single, rather uninspired sentence is difficult. I don't want to give away too much, especially if it's a plotty sort of story. At the same time, I don't care for the common fallback of just quoting the first few lines. Especially given that my first lines are often short and snappy, but not very informative.

Tags are hard, too.

Not the character tags: they're straightforward. But the freeforms can be tough to decide on. The one that's easy is "canon-divergent AU": if it is, then that certainly needs to go in. If the story is heavily derived from a particular episode, then I cite that. Otherwise, I guess I may mention things like "historical" and "canon-derived", if they apply. Mostly, though, I don't use a lot of freeforms.

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25 Days of Writing: Day 14

14. At what point in writing do you come up with a title?

Usually, the name comes to me fairly soon. Occasionally before I even start writing! (There's a plot bunny named "Summit Blues" that has not a single word to its name.) Mind you, that's pretty rare; but it is true that, if I don't have a title to hang on the fic, I find it hard to get down to writing. Sometimes that means I use a working title, and hope that something better will eventually occur to me. Most of the time it does. If not, then somewhere towards the end I will start googling for quotations, quips, or sayings that have some relation with the theme or subject of the story in the hope that one will hit the spot. Normally, I find something in under an hour. And that's only if I have to go hunting.

It's rare for me to post a story and then alter the title; but it did happen recently. I wrote a M*A*S*H story in which BJ got a tin of peanut butter cookies from his wife, leading to some slice-of-life banter involving Hawkeye and Frank Burns. I initially gave it the title, "The Peanut Gallery"; but, at the last minute, I whipped in and altered it to "The Peanut Butter Gallery".

There was one multi-part story, though, that never did get its proper name. It was written piecemeal in response to a prompt on

maryrenaultfics: "apple". As I couldn't think of a title, I simply referred to it as "my applefic". I did this so long that, when it came time to collect all the ficlets together, I couldn't think of it in any other way. So "Applefic" it remains to this day.

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25 Days of Writing: Day 13

13. Do you share your writing online? (Drop a link!) Do you have projects you’ve kept just for yourself?

Most of my stories are on the Archive of Our Own and my own website. However, there are two groups of things that are on my website but not on AO3: my virtual season and my war!fic.

In the case of the war posts, it's partly because it would mean little to someone who was not on the FK mailing lists, and partly because—even if you are a Forever Knight fan—you'd need the rest of the War to really get what's going on. I fought in Wars 13, 14, and 15, as well as writing a couple of ficlets set in the war!verse.

In the case of the virtual season, it's a matter of formatting. Actually that's the reason I have a website at all. I wrote FK4 in a modification of full script format. Trying to adapt that into text in order to post to the mailing list proved so much of a nuisance that it was actually easier to learn HTML. (Plus, of course, it afforded the chance to do pretty things with webpage design. The actual episodes were uploaded as zipped Word files, each linked to its own title page.) AO3 also has formatting constraints; and, although I did essay the translation of the first two episodes into a form acceptable to AO3's server, in the end I never bothered to do any more of them. So FK4 is on my website.

There are things that aren't on line. These include a few things written once-upon-a-time long-long-ago, i.e. my old K/S Star Trek novel and five or six Next Gen scripts. Also an unfinished novel that started out as Alias Smith and Jones fanfic, but had the serial numbers scratched off before I'd even finished Chapter Two. I only got eight chapters in, plus the final chapter.

Wow! I'm more than halfway through this already!

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25 Days of Writing: Day 12

12. Do you want your writing to be famous?

Let's face it: I write fan fiction for what mostly are very rare fandoms. By the standards of anyone into a megafandom, my stuff is scarcely read at all. And outside fandom, no fan fiction has any fame—well, unless it's had its serial numbers scrubbed off; and, even then, it pretty well has to be badly written BDSM smut. (I assume you know what THAT jaundiced remark refers to!)

Seriously, though, of course I would like my writing to be famous. (I'm only human.) It's just that my own definition of "famous" involves things like being found in libraries and taught in university courses. So I doubt if it will happen unless I finish some original fiction and get it published and it's critically well received. A fair few conditions there—and all dependent on the first, i.e. writing it.

Saving that, I think I'll settle for having those few who do read my stories enjoying them, commenting on them, and maybe even reccing them.

"Fame" in fandom tends to end in infamy, anyway. Who wants that?

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25 Days of Writing: Day 11

11. What do you envy in other writers?

The ability to keep on going to the very end of some really long fic idea.

Novels are being written out there today: I've read several written by ardent Arrowverse authors. Mind you, I've also encountered more than a few bogged-down WIPs. But there are people who really do slog on to the very utter end of something that's 200+ K words long. And there's a fabulous comics-based Flash AU by enina that started in 2015, is already well over a million words, and still going.

Once upon a time, long long ago, I slogged my way all the way through a K/S pon farr novel which had, besides that, a main action plot and a subplot involving a set of junior crew members. I made myself write at least one page a day, every day. Longhand. It got written piecemeal; so there were big gaps between the scenes. If you can even call them scenes! Bitty wee bits. Eventually I typed the whole thing out, filled in the gaps, and revised it a few times. The first few months took a lot of determination; but, in the end, I got inspired to real speed and wrote several pages a day. I've never gone back to re-read it, and I dare say it isn't very good; but the point is that I did actually finish it.

Once upon a time, almost as long ago, I wrote an entire 22-episode virtual season. Initially, I was just doing "an episode" (and then another, and another); but I quite quickly got the idea of writing a full set. They, too, were written out of order. Eventually I had to decide how to organize the thing and fill in blanks. It took years.

Nowadays, I often find myself daunted approaching a gift exchange assignment that typically finishes up at a mere 3K or so. And it's not the fact that I'm writing to a prompt, either. What's depressing is the fact that I do still have a "big idea" or three; and I just can't get down to working on any of them really.

There is always something else to do. Witness the fact that I'm doing this instead of my

worldbuildingex assignment!

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25 Days of Writing: Day 10

10. How would you describe your writing process?

Painful.

Well, not physically. But there are times when it feels like pulling teeth. Stories don't write themselves; and some of them are downright uncooperative. Yes, okay: drabbles and ficlets can be written very quickly. (Otherwise there's no point in bothering with something that short.) But the longer works! Aaargghhhhh!!!!

Oh, otherwise? Once upon a time I wrote longhand. Then I typed, and literally had to cut and paste alterations in using scissors and cellotape. Nowadays, I compose directly onto the computer.

Then I revise. The first revision is the one that really pulls things together. After that comes as much polishing as I have time for (given deadlines when I'm writing for a gift exchange). Even so, when I re-read my old stories, I often find typos that have eluded me. One advantage of posting on-line is the ability to correct them ... even years later. :)

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25 Days of Writing: Day 9

9. Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other? Both, or neither?

I've not done much real longfic writing: novels and the like. However, I've written everything from drabbles to novellas. The shorter the fic, the more I pants it: inspiration goes straight to keyboard. Longer stories need plotting. This often takes place over weeks of thinking before I ever start writing.

Sometimes it happens through research: this is especially true for stories with a strong historical component. In such cases, I often wonder if I'm ever going to start to write; but actually what it means is that there's a period in which I'm taking in so much data that my brain needs time to synthesize it into worldbuilding before the plot can come.

Sometimes it happens through daydreaming: often I'll focus on critical scenes, going over and over them and working out what happens around them. At one time, I'd write those scenes first; but nowadays I usually go Humpty Dumpty style, i.e. start at the beginning and go on to the end and then stop. And then revise!

However, there are other times when the plotting is done section by section. This is especially true for the handful of longer things I've written. In that case, it's still done by thinking things out; but I only have a vague idea of how things are heading in the long run. The details of each section are worked out, it's written, and then I move on to the details of the next section. I do always know how it will end, though!

I don't write outlines. The planning is normally all done in my head. The only time I can recall ever working anything out on paper was the subplot flow for FK4; and that was done very near the end. Most of the virtual season was held entirely in my head over the years I took to write it. However, I should point out that each episode was written separately. It was only piecing it all together that needed a bit of pen and paper to make sure each subplot got ordered correctly across the episodes.

I'm basically pretty okay with how I plan (or don't plan) my stories. I just wish the actual writing came more easily.

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25 Days of Writing: Day 8

8. Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?

Yes and no. I'd say that everything I like to write is included in the sorts of things I read. However, I read more widely than I write. When scanning the stories in a gift exchange collection, I'll take a look at fic for most fandoms where I'm familiar with the canon. I'll also take a quick look through the Original Fiction to see if anything tickles my fancy.

I read a lot more romance than I write, if only because such a high proportion of fan fiction includes at least some such scenes. I'm there for the plot, though—well, plot and characterization and worldbuilding. If I realize it's a PWP, I'll just back-button. Even with lovely plotty stories, I mostly skim fast over any smutty bits, because I find them boring.

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25 Days of Writing: Day 7

7. What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

Ooh, this is a tricky one. I've done a bit of an analysis of the first and last lines of some of my stories. (In 2019 it was just first lines; in 2019, it was both first and last lines.) I concluded that, in both cases, I had a tendency to write something short and snappy. As I put it, "They're designed to grab you fast and toss you on to the rest of the paragraph, wherein lies the real interest."

Beyond that, I would say that I tend to change my style depending on the story. For pastiche, of course, I try to simulate the style of the author. For historical fiction, I try for something with the sort of complex sentence structure of a Victorian novel. For casefic, I'm more likely to write choppy vivid sentences, such as one might find in a police procedural. But it's very much "horses for courses".

In this year's Snowflake Challenge, No. 12 was to do one of the old memes from LJ days. I picked the "I Write" meme, and applied it to some of my FK fic. This is what I reported:

There was a tendency for the stories with a cop-show feel to be compared to Stephen King, while the historical vampire ones got either Anne Rice or Arthur C. Clarke. Agatha Christie turned up a couple of times. However....

The story "En Vacances" is written from alternating perspectives in Paris and a hospital room in Toronto. It is supposed to have a certain enigmatic air about it. Even so, I was surprised when the Paris sections got ascribed variously to James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and Cory Doctorow. And the hospital scenes were ascribed to James Fenimore Cooper, Vladimir Nabokov, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde.

Granted, some of the sections are fairly short. But the whole thing was written by just me; and it's all one story, too. (On my website and on AO3.)

I don't know about other people; but it would seem the "I Write" meme agrees that my style varies a lot.

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25 Days of Writing: Day 6

6. What character do you have the most fun writing?

In some ways I think I answered this already: as a Die-Hard, I don't play favourites. Of course, that applies particularly to my FK fic. However, a lot of what I write nowadays is giftfic in exchanges—and much of that is treats, which being motivated by intriguing prompts in rare fandoms that I've often never written in before, tend to be one-offs. So it's not so much specific characters that appeal to me as worldbuilding.

I'd have to say, though, that I am intrigued by the character of Leonard Snart. Not so much in the comics—though he was always one of my favourite Rogues in The Flash, especially in the early versions of the group. The iteration in the Arrowverse series, on the other hand, has a lot to offer a writer.

There's his "Captain Cold" persona, which is clearly a role he plays for effect. There's his backstory: how his childhood and youth shaped him into the man he becomes. There's the shift in characterization from the villain whom the Flash first fights, to the more complex man who decides to join the Legends, to the hero who sacrifices himself to save his friend, his crew, and time itself. And last, but far from least, if he is somehow saved and returned to the present day, there's the further evolution of his character going into the future.

A lot of potential for fic, in other words.

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25 day writing meme

25 Days of Writing: Day 5

5. What character that you're writing do you most identify with?

When I first joined FORKNI-L, people asked me what my faction was; and I always replied that, as someone who had written a virtual season, I don't play favourites since I have to be able to write all the characters. As far as that goes, I hold to it; but that didn't stop me from playing in three Forever Knight Wars as a Die-Hard. Then again, that's the faction for people who refuse to pick a faction.

My parents always told me that it's important to be able to see the other person's point of view. (Mind you, I think this was mostly because I was the eldest of three. If you have siblings, you know what I mean.) Nowadays, I'd say it's more like seeing all sides of a situation.

For example, I have to admit to a certain fellow feeling with Natalie. Her interest in researching Nick's condition from a medical perspective is one that I can identify with. Having said that, though, we are otherwise very different: she's a good "people person", and obviously interested in Nick romantically. The hours she works (and the fact that she's attracted to a guy who's a vampire!) make it more difficult; but I'd say her goals in life include marrying and having a family. In that respect, I don't identify with her at all.

You can say the same of pretty well all the characters in every fandom: to write them, one needs to be able to see their point of view; but I never really identify with them.

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25 Days of Writing: Day 4

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like).

I found this one remarkably hard to do. It's not that there aren't things I've written that I'm proud of. However, they can't usually be pinned down a single line or so. They're more often longer passages that have a point to make, or sections of a story that took a lot of research. In the end, I picked this:

She cherished every memory. She had never wanted to move on. Yet still things slipped out of mind.

Photo albums had been her preserve. So a couple of the best pictures, blown up and framed, presided in the living room: one on the table by his armchair and the other on the mantelpiece. His face, never changing, never forgotten. Always dear. She had long since gone grey, but he never would.

And at first she could hear him in her head. With a dry comment, perhaps, as she watched the TV news. Or praising her cake, as he’d done so often (just before stealing a dollop of icing, and licking his finger with loud smacking appreciation). Now, though … now she woke, once in a while, from a dream that he was alive: amnesia for years perhaps, finally returned home. Yet, once her eyes were open, she could only remember that she had heard his voice and known it instantly.

It comes from "Festival of Festivals" (on AO3), which I wrote for

fkficfest in 2016. It was a remarkably difficult passage to write. I think I spent at least an hour over just those few words. Maybe more. My mother had died less than a year earlier; and it evoked all the loss I was still feeling.

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25 Days of Writing: Day 3

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway).

It's not so much single scenes as it is humungously huge plot bunnies. If it's a single scene, it will be for a fandom I write in regularly; and any readers will know the basic background already. In that case, I'll knock it out—for a treat, if I'm in the throes of a gift exchange and there's a relevant prompt—and post it. And that will shut it up!

No, it's the fat bunnies. They made fantastic eating once they're cooked, mind you. But, as Mrs Beeton said, first you have to catch them.

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25 Days of Writing: Day 2

2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project.

I'm not sure I ever "look forward" to writing! It would be more accurate to say that I look forward to having written. Still, one thing I would like to do this year is finish a series of Arrowverse stories that I started a couple of years ago.

Most fic writers who tackle the story of Leonard Snart's childhood depict it as almost entirely negative, particularly his relationship with his father.

However, if he were routinely thrashed within an inch of his life with untended broken bones, not to mention being chronically half starved, then there is no way he could possibly have grown up to look like Wentworth Miller. That Lewis Snart was a dysfunctional father—a career criminal who taught his young son to assist him in his thieving—is canon; but that doesn't necessarily mean that he was a hundred per cent a bad dad in other respects. At least, not when his son was a child. Why would Leonard be so stricken when he finally kills his father if there were not more going on underneath, way back when, long before the events of "A Family of Rogues"?

Anyway, I wrote the first three installments for the Worldbuilding Exchange in 2019; and

fearbuddies helped me write two more installments last summer. I would like to get the story finished: probably another three parts.

Whether it's rightly a series is another matter. On AO3 it is posted as such; but that's because each part was completed separately. However, if I'd been able to get down to it betimes, I'd have done them as chapters. I've not posted the completed stories on my website yet: I want to finish the lot. I've done their webpage, though; and, yes, they're all on one page. There's also an index page; but the presentation is chaptered. I'm quite pleased with the layout and graphics, and rather looking forward to the day when I can unveil them.

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25 Days of Writing: Day 1

I've been so intrigued by

lightbird's responses to this, that I've decided to try it myself.

1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

At the moment, I'm working on my assignment for the Worldbuilding Exchange (

worldbuildingex). Obviously, since it's a gift exchange with an anon period, I can't talk much about it. I can say that it's an idea that I've had for a long time.

It's going to be quite a long, plotty story. The frustrating thing is that, while I know where I want it to head, actually getting the scenes down can be tricky. Sometimes they play themselves out in my head when I'm lying in bed; but then, when I actually get down to writing, they decide to come out differently—and painfully slowly. But I've been here before. Anything besides a tiny ficlet (if I dash off immediately and write the whole thing in less than an hour) always seems to need prying out word by word.

The easiest thing to write is dialogue. There's a reason I wrote a virtual season in a script format! It's getting all the in-between bits down that's painful; yet action requires description, and one must set the scene. Still, taking it all in all, though at times it feels as though I'm pulling teeth, when I reread what I've already got down I realize that some parts of the story are going great guns.

It should all come together in the end. At the moment, though, I'm far off getting there.

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2020 Fan Fiction Year-in-Review

To say that 2020 was a horrible year is to state the obvious. It started okay: I came home from visiting my sister for Christmas, and signed up for Chocolate Box and the Worldbuilding Exchange. Then the pandemic hit; and we all went into lockdown. Just going to do basic grocery shopping left one with the feeling one was taking one's life into one's hands: outside was a place of peril. In theory, all that spare time could have afforded me the opportunity to do some major writing. Perhaps it should have! In practice, though, my focus was sadly diffuse. It was hard to think of anything but the news.

To try to take my mind off the world going to hell in a handbasket, I decided to make myself keep busy by writing a lot of ficlets. Every couple of days, I'd try to think of some character(s) I'd not yet written about and devise a tiny premise. All are Forever Knight, for which I require little or no canon review. Thus passed April and May, with the sequence broken only by my writing a shortish story for

fkficfest. The result is an absurd number of little fic. To myself, I think of them as my COVID Collection. A ghastly name, I know; so, in the list below, I've just labelled them "CC".

By the summer I'd pretty well written myself out of small plot bunnies. In any case, life had mysteriously settled into a horrid sort of routine. (It's astonishing how a pandemic can become a new normal.) So in July I decided to change things up by doing the

sunshine_challenge, for which—given the theme the mods chose—I wrote most of my posts about colours. After that, I signed up for

fearbuddies. Though I'd been quite unable to tackle a backlog of unwritten stories earlier in the year, Fear Buddies enabled me to make a stab at finishing a series of Arrowverse stories about the childhood of Leonard Snart that I'd started for Worldbuilding in 2019. Twice a week I sent updates to my partner: the idea was not that they'd read them, but that the little deadlines would enable me to keep writing. Though I didn't finish the series, I did write two more installments—each of them substantially longer than the earlier ones had beem.

By the fall, my fannish life had pretty well returned to normal. In other words, I did Trick or Treat and Yuletide, and wrote multiple fic for both. And, if Christmas was sadly solitary, I did at least manage to get my tree decorated. I've a lot of balls and bells to put on it; so that's an achievement in itself. Alas, the original plans for my sister to visit me couldn't possibly come off in the circumstances. Next year, I hope.

So here's what I wrote this past year:

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snowflake challenge

Fandom Snowflake 2021 #14

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring a chubby brown and red bird surrounded by falling snow. Text: Snowflake Challenge: 1-31 January.

In your own space, remix an existing work into a new media,....

Not something I can tackle right this minute! And I don't read a lot of remixes. However, I do wonder if something I did a few years ago might qualify. I don't know if it does but....

Is a Yahoo!Group an "existing work"? Not today, for sure, since they've all been discontinued. However, once upon a time ... would a Yahoo!Group be considered a "work"? Not my work, certainly; but I think one could argue that each of them was the collective creation of the fans who were members.

At any rate, over most of 2012 (plus a few more done since), I created a series of icons for all of the Forever Knight factions that I could find. Now, if you were never on FORKNI-L, the FK mailing list, you probably have no idea what a "faction" is. The faction names started as referents for followers of particular characters—and later, pairings—who played as teams in the Wars. (These were basically a series of round-robin RPGs played on list.) However, when Yahoo!Groups began, most of the factions started their own so that they could chat with a cluster of friends about ... well, all kinds of things. Obviously, this would include FK, their favourite character/pairing, and the next War; but also their personal lives, current events, and other fannish interests. Some of these Yahoo!Groups were very active, and developed their own distinct cultures.

This means that the icons that I was making—at least those for established factions—needed to be more than just captioned screencaps. Each icon had to capture the essence of the faction it represented. It had to summarize the Yahoo!Group.

Many icons, therefore, required me to composit a number of different elements.

The oldest factions had symbols, which were originally rough sketches put on buttons for a convention. Some factions had later redone them; and new factions had created their own. So I needed to translate these into something that could be matched with the other elements of the icon.
I usually included a screencap; and with some characters I had a lot to choose from. I needed to pick one that would be appropriate to the faction: the expression on the face(s) was critical.
Other things were included either to represent some aspect of the faction's culture, or to represent something specific to the characters/pairings involved.

At first, I only planned to do the main factions; but in the end the spirit of completism took over. As each new set of icons was completed, I made a post on my journal, with the icons and a discussion of their design. The link was then posted to FORKNI-L. After a number of posts, I started to get a fair bit of response. In fact, the mailing list fandom eventually got down to a bout of factioneering. Not for the first time: it used to be an occasional amusement. However, this time a lot of new names were bandied about—and even voted on, when there were multiple suggestions. So yet more were made!

You can find the whole group of icons here. Most link to a larger version, which was demanded by list members who wanted to see more of the detail.

For established factions, especially those where there were still members on list, the design had to be approved. It is true that some icons hit the spot immediately; but I often had to change things. A lot of faction members really cared about their symbols; so each updated version I created had to be okayed before I could use it. And there were other types of alteration that people wanted, too. For example, the icon I originally made for the Cousins of the Knight had the crossed swords behind a smaller pocket watch; but I was told that this "felt wrong". The faction leader admitted she'd never realized before how significant the symbolism of the swords was, and asked me to reverse it. The icon for the FK Pagans also had to be extensively redone. I still think the original version was prettier; but they felt it was too Celtic. And the icon for the Dark Perks needed a new rabbit head: their leader loved the pic of Tracy; but she said the rabbit absolutely had to be a white one.

So, if translating a Yahoo!Group into an icon counts....

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snowflake challenge

Fandom Snowflake 2021 #13

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring a wrapped giftbox with a snowflake on the gift tag. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31

Today's challenge is to list fandom resources that I use.

First off has to be Wikipedia. No, I know it's not a specifically fandom resource (and I know everyone is familiar with it already); but I use it a lot, especially when I'm writing any story with an historical setting. I may well use other sources, too: when I need a lot of specific information about a particular period, Wikipedia is likely to be inadequate. But it's told me about the US TV schedule for 1968, described Roman glassware, and given me an alternative Hastings with its own Battle. Among so many other verisimilitudinous details.

Second on the list have to be other wikis (collectively!) since they're utterly invaluable for checking canon details. I trust we all know Fanlore? Here are four fandom-specific wikis that I use:

Arthur Ransome Wiki (558 pages) - Ransome himself, and the "Swallows and Amazons" series, including adaptations
Arrowverse Wiki (10,487 pages) - all series in the CW Arrowverse
Forever Knight Wiki (5548 pages) - Forever Knight, both the series and fannish activities - especially dear to my heart, since I'm an editor there
Monster M*A*S*H Wiki (1111 pages) - all versions of MASH, including the TV sequel series

Third has to be the Forkni-L Archives, which comprise the major part of Knightwind's Nook. Alas, it only covers digests from 2000 to the present, plus a few months from 1996. Nor is it searchable, save those pages currently scanned by Google. Nevertheless, it has told me a lot about FK fandom in its latter heyday; and a lot of what I have learned there has found itself into those portions of the FK Wiki that deal with fan activities, and some thence to Fanlore.

Fourth is the Forever Knight Website Archive. Sadly incomplete, it nevertheless has over a hundred old sites. These include the main fanfic archive, faction sites, several war archives, the Kickstart the Knight campaign, the NATPE Seven History, and sundry else from the fandom's history. In addition, there are a lot of ancient personal sites (and my own, which is still active). Those old sites vary enormously in content and in quality; looking through them is a lesson in fannish history in itself.

Crossposts: https://greerwatson.livejournal.com/84443.html

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worldbuilding exchange

Dear Worldbuilder

Let me thank you right up front for whatever you are going to write. Although you've seen the tags on my sign-up, I know that most people like more than that to go on, so I hope this letter will prove helpful. I like all these fandoms equally; so I've just put them in alphabetical order.

If you're just looking for my general likes and dislikes, you'll find them at the end.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: https://greerwatson.livejournal.com/84015.html

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Fandom Snowflake 2021 #9

It seems a bit weird to tout one's own virtues—or rec one's own fic, for that matter. I notice others have said the same thing. Basically, we're told not to when we're little kids; and that's pretty well reinforced as we get older, too.

Anyway, I see most people have given a few of their own stories. So here are five of mine, each in a different fandom. The main links are to my website, since I have to admit I am proud of the webpages I make for my stories.

"A Different Shade of Gold" - S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders
I first read this book when it was bought by our public library some months after publication, when I was Ponyboy's age. Each time I have read it since, I'm a bit older and my perspectives have shifted. Here I translate that into fiction: Ponyboy as he might be today, a guy around my own age rereading that old "class assignment" after so many years. (Written for luciferinasundaysuit in waybackexchange 2019. On AO3 here.)
"Exiles of the Sunless Sea" - C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia
I wrote this after a mad post-sign-up scramble through the tagset to find a request that I felt I could offer. In The Silver Chair, Lewis created the deep underground realm of Bism; but, although Jill and Eustace meet its exiled inhabitants, they had long since been bespelled into minions of evil. My story turns the tale round, to show the Bismian perspective on their situation. (Written for deepdarkwaters in worldbuildingex 2017. On AO3 here.)
"Hobbiton Farm" - BBC Historical Farms series X The Lord of the Rings
This was actually an extra prompt in a Yuletide letter. A crackfic notion, of course; but I decided to treat it seriously. What if, in a modern Middle-earth, the BBC did a series in which Ruth, Alex, and Peter spent a year living the life of the hobbits of Hobbiton? (Written for halotolerant in Yuletide 2015. On AO3 here.)
"Stopped Cold" - The Flash (CW TV)
When TPTB decided to write Leonard Snart and Mick Rory out of The Flash and into Legends of Tomorrow, they drew a line under any chance of a TV version of the Rogues from the Flash comics. Most fans at the time wrote AUs in which the group were recruited shortly after Season One; but, coming into the fandom some years later, I wondered what it would be like if Cold were instead rescued from the Oculus explosion after a significant time gap; found the differences in the Waverider crew too disconcerting; and only then decided to return to Central City to start the Rogues. I've never essayed the whole story. I did, however, snip out this part of the tale: the newly formed Rogues' first heist, and its aftermath. (Written for rivulet027 in worldbuildingex 2018. On AO3 here.)
"A Winchester Always" - M*A*S*H (TV)
This is nominally a remix of my sister's story, "Secrets and Lies"; but, to my way of thinking, it would be better described as a co-writing project, even though my involvement was pretty ex post facto. She picked up the assignment and came up with the basic plot, and the notion of alternating between the "today" of 1968 and flashbacks to the Korean War. I heavily reorganized it and doubled its length. (Written in remixrevival 2019. On AO3 here.)