For this year's fkficfest, my original intention was to write the story I had failed to complete the last year—the more so since one of the three prompts was "déjà vu"; and I could clearly see a way to work it in. So I got out the newspaper clippings again, sorted them even more finely, and began to read. Sadly, just as last year, I found it extremely difficult to come to grips with my memories. In the end, therefore, I decided to write on a very different topic, i.e. Nick's relationship with his master, LaCroix; and I slanted my story to reflect instead the prompt "do over".

"Knight of the Rose" draws particularly on the flashbacks to the first-season episode "Dance by the Light of the Moon", in which LaCroix brings Nick across in 1228, and the second-season episode "Be My Valentine", in which LaCroix falls in love with Nick's sister, Fleur. In the latter, LaCroix agrees to give up the idea of bringing Fleur across, but only for a price: some day, Nick will give his own lover up as recompense. This ties in very nicely with events in the present day story. However, when one thinks about the actual terms of the bargain, they make very little sense. Why would LaCroix give up the love of his life for Nick's sake—the more so since, in "Dance by the Light of the Moon", he only brought him across because Janette asked him to?

From my first viewing of "Be My Valentine", I felt highly suspcious about the motives of TPTB. I'm sure other fans felt the same. If you got outside the secondary world to look at the primary-world motives of producers and writers, it does seem very much as though Fleur was created to be a "safe" (i.e., heterosexual) romantic substitute for Nick himself. And that was before I knew that, while Season One was in production, Nigel Bennett apparently thought LaCroix's obsession with Nick was sexually based. So do a lot of fans. In fact, there's a whole factionsworth who think that Nick reciprocates, if only in an on-again off-again manner.

With no disrespect to Fleur, who is a charming character in her own right, there is just something awfully convenient in having LaCroix fall in love with Nick's sister!

So "Knight of the Rose" was written to throw some light on all of this.

The association of Fleur with white roses in "Be My Valentine" not only gave me the title of the story, but also the theme for the webpage. The rose background comes from Silvia Hartmann Nature. Granted, the flowers are actually blush and ivory; but the hint of colour adds depth. It also meant that I slightly retinted the roses I used to decorate the page. These come from Flamin's Florals; but are old graphics that can be found elsewhere as well.

I decided that the border around the central panel should be contrastive; and, since flowers go with leaves, green tones seemed appropriate. The broad shimmery band is a variant of gold-refraction.jpg, a graphic that I got from Heather's Animations. The twists are one of many variants of 321Clipart's bg64.jpg. I usually use them with a mere one-pixel cellpadding as a substitute for the border feature on the nested tables; and, if you look closely, you can see that a light green variant has been used in this way to edge the shimmery green band. However, a dark green variant (reduced to half-size and used with thicker cellpadding) creates the appearance of a rope edging on both the inside and outside of the border.

Although originally a gift exchange, in 2019, FK Fic Fest was run as a prompt challenge. In honour of its tenth anniversary, the prompt was "ten years".

My original intention was to use the freedom of not having a specific recipient to write a story that I have had in mind since 2010. While it did not directly involve "ten years", I was sure I could work the words in somewhere. So I spent quite a bit of time hunting out and sorting a large number of newspaper clippings that I had kept. However, as in the previous year, I had trouble getting down to actual writing. This time, it was because the events I wished to work into the story had been hard to live through, for I had been contiguous to them, even though they had not impacted me personally. In the end, I simply ran out of time to complete a story of the length I envisaged. Instead, at the last minute, I brainstormed a different plot while walking home from my weekly singing lesson, whipped straight into writing it, and posted just before the deadline.

"Know Why I Cry" is a postscript to the Season One episode, "Only the Lonely", very popular with fans since its flashback describes how Nick and Natalie first meet. The main plot involves a serial killer who finally targets Natalie; and, as so often happens in TV shows, the climax is her rescue. In real life, of course, things could never simply end at that point. Natalie would be a witness—indeed, the key witness—in the subsequent prosecution. However, the show was old-fashioned even for its day: there was little continuity; so each episode was independent, meaning there was no follow-up. "Know Why I Cry" picks up, therefore, some months later on the eve of the trial, and deals with the lingering effect on Natalie, who is obviously suffering some measure of PTSD,

To reflect her depression, I decided to use dark neutral tones in the webpage. The main background tile is one of the many variants that I have made from GRSites' brown128.jpg, this time in shades of charcoal/brown/tan feathered with a dull cool grey. The border arround the central panel picks up these shades, with bands of warm brown marble and dark teal, edged with lines of copper. One of the teal graphics comes from Absolute Cross; and there is a decorative button from Ambographics Art.

Over the past eighteen months, I've participated in fkficfest three times. I wrote "Gone Where the Goblins Go" in 2018, "Know Why I Cry" in 2019, and "Knight of the Rose" in 2020.

FK Fic Fest was originally created as a gift exchange; and "Gone Where the Goblins Go" was written for purselover2 to the prompt, "Gen Request, Natalie and Nick, celebrating something". I decided to write about Natalie's relationship with her grandmother, Nana Tash, whose ghost appeared to her in the third season episode, "Dead of Night", in which we learn that Natalie refused to visit her in hospital. Although by the time of the episode, Natalie has had time to regret this, it takes quite a lot of rancour to refuse to visit someone who is dying. So I thought that, however perverse it might seem to an outsider, she might actually have felt that her Nana's death was worth celebrating.

This proved to be a difficult story to write: hard enough, in fact, that I had to ask for a brief extension. I framed "Gone Where the Goblins Go" around Natalie's visiting Nana Tash's lawyer and the reading of the will; and used her inheritance to explain her change of apartments between Season One and Season Two. However, my own mother died in late 2015; and, as the family member still living in the same city, I perforce was the one who had to deal with much of the wind-up of the estate—sorting personal and household things, in particular. As I wrote, some scenes (such as the one in the lawyer's office) brought this all back too keenly; and I kept having to stop for a bit.

I had no particular theme in mind for the webpage, save that the colour scheme should be fairly neutral. For the main background, I therefore chose a tile from Ambographics Art that is in light beige and grey shades with a complex geometric pattern; and used a compatible square button from the same source for decoration. The border around the story panel picks up similar tones, with a slight added glitz from a narrow band featuring an abalone shell tile from Heather's Animations.

Given that my last discussion of Renault-based fan fiction was back at the beginning of 2018 for my newly posted Yulefic, one might be forgiven for thinking I'd have a plethora of new pages to describe. However, the demise of maryrenaultfics, with its frequent little challenges, means that I've only written Charioteer fic for Yuletide. Specifically, two stories in 2018 ("Deckle-Edged" and "Quandary") and one in 2019 ("Let Me Fend for Myself").

Sadly, it's not a fandom often requested in other gift exchanges; and, in the last few years, I've had a lot of trouble getting myself stuck into stories unless I've a recipient to feel guilty about.

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Was it really February when I last posted? I know I've been doing so less and less (and never as often as some), but still! I've certainly done quite a bit of writing since then. Just not here.

That post was a round up of last year's fic. I said then:

I honestly feel that in some ways my biggest accomplishment has been finally putting Filezilla on the old laptop I've been using. I have thus been able to upload to my website. As I suspect pretty well everyone who reads my fic does so on AO3, this probably seems trivial. However, I do like designing pages for the stories I write; and it has been frustrating having them waiting around on the computer with no way to put them up.

Now, I used to regularly write here about the new pages I'd made for my website. It's well over eighteen months since my old PC broke and I started using my mother's laptop; and—despite the delay in getting Filezilla on it—it has, at this point, been quite a few months since I started to upload new pages again. Looking back, I see that my 2017 Yuletide stories were the last fic whose webpages I wrote about here. It's long past high time that I got caught up!

When I take a look at my 2018 year-in-review, the list is headed by my first Legends of Tomorrow ficlet. Given that I watched and loved most of the CW Arrowverse shows from the first episode of Arrow, it's surprising that it took me so long to get the urge to write fic for them. The commonality of themes and textures I've used in their webpages makes it sensible to deal with them all together.

Anyway, that's as good a place as any to start.

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Running a little late, but I've been doing this annually so....

Most of last year's fic was, once again, written for gift exchanges. As I was a bit "written out" after Yuletide, I felt it better to take a short break at the beginning of 2019. Then I signed up for the Worldbuilding Exchange, followed by the new Wayback Exchange (for which I wrote a pinch hit), Not Prime Time, FK Fic Fest (of course!), Remix Revival, the Exchange at Fic Corner, Trick or Treat, and Yuletide. For the last of these, I wrote six stories—though one of these was both short and late, and went into the Madness collection.

Having said all this, I honestly feel that in some ways my biggest accomplishment has been finally putting Filezilla on the old laptop I've been using. I have thus been able to upload to my website. As I suspect pretty well everyone who reads my fic does so on AO3, this probably seems trivial. However, I do like designing pages for the stories I write; and it has been frustrating having them waiting around on the computer with no way to put them up. So those links are included below along with the AO3 ones.

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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.

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First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them.


GENERAL POINTS:

• I love worldbuilding and character pieces—stories that explore more deeply—through backstory, or by elaborating the setting/history/culture or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen, unless otherwise specified. However, I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me. For pairings, my tastes are pretty vanilla.


• I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. (There may be other specific exceptions.)


• I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)


• I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.


• No second person fic, please. First person is okay, especially for book canons that were written that way by the author.
  

REQUESTS: ( Read more... )

greerwatson on AO3.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.


GENERAL POINTS:

• I love worldbuilding and character pieces—stories that explore more deeply—through backstory, or by elaborating the setting/history/culture or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen; but I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships. However, I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me. For pairings, my tastes are pretty vanilla.


• I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. (There may be other specific exceptions.)


• I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)


• I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.


• No second-person fic, please. My feelings on first person vary. As a rule, I don't care for it with TV fandoms; but it is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author.
  

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UPDATE

I have nominated Forever Knight with the following characters:

    - Nick Knight
    - Lucien LaCroix
    - Don Schanke
    - Javier Vachon

One is only allowed to nominate four characters. So if there are others you feel should be in the tag set (e.g., Natalie, Janette, Tracy, Urs, Screed, Grace, etc.), then someone else will have to add them.

Nominations remain open until October 10 or 11 depending on your time zone. If you want to know more about Yuletide, have a look on yuletide_admin. Adding to the tag set is done on AO3 here.

I do hope there are other people wanting to request and/or write FK this year!

It's that time of year again! Yuletide nominations have started and, as usual, I plan to nominate, request, and offer Forever Knight.

If anyone else is planning on nominating FK? If so, perhaps we could get together in order to ensure that we don't put in duplicate characters. One only gets four slots for characters; and there are are a lot of intriguing people to write about.

By the way, I was surprised to discover that there are over 900 FK stories that are 1K or more in length. That's combining AO3 and FanFiction.net. (Not the big FK archives or the personal sites.) This means that 2019 may be last year that FK is eligible for Yuletide.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. (They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.) I should also say up front that I'm easy on getting either a trick or a treat.


GENERAL POINTS:

• I love worldbuilding and character pieces—stories that explore more deeply—through backstory, or by elaborating the setting/history/culture or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen; but I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships. However, I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me. For pairings, my tastes are pretty vanilla.


• I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. (There may be other specific exceptions.)


• I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)


• I enjoy comedy: being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.


• No second person fic, please. First person is okay, especially for book canons that were written that way by the author.
  

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Let me thank you right up front for whatever you are going to write. Although you've seen my sign-up, I know that most people like more than that to go on. I hope this letter will prove helpful. I know I've said more about some fandoms than others, but please don't read any significance in that. All are dear to my heart. (I've listed them alphabetically.)


GENERAL POINTS:

• I love worldbuilding and character pieces—stories that explore more deeply—through backstory, or by elaborating the setting/history/culture or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen; but I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships. However, I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me, especially when dealing with children's books.


• I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. (There may be other specific exceptions.)


• I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic or killed in war, and that sort of thing.)


• I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.


• No second person fic, please. First person is okay, especially for book canons that were written that way by the author.

( Read more... )

From moetushie, I have the following:

1. Tents:

Right at the moment, the Toronto Star is running its usual series of columns encouraging people to donate to their Fresh-Air fund to send kids away to summer camp. There's a lot of fond reminiscing along the usual lines.

Well, I remember the municipal day camp that our parents sent us to. The kids were taken by school bus from their local schools, crammed in tightly to a degree that was surely illegal, disembarked somewhere in the ravine of the Don River (not the real one!), and split into small groups of about a dozen kids the same age, each group with its own tent in a small clearing. You get what you pay for: the municipal day camp was cheap in every way. My memories are of heat, thirst, and boredom.


2. Candles:

My sister likes to have lit candles on the dining room table when there's a celebration. However, she also collects fancy candles—or, at least, she used to actively do so, and still has them in a display cabinet. She's got molded ones in fancy shapes, carved ones, ones done with layers of different colours, or with inclusions. These are definitely not for burning!

Around her birthday and Christmas I keep an eye out for any sort I don't remember her having. A fancy candle makes a good extra present.


3. Shell:

I used to collect seashells. When I was a kid, these were mostly ones my dad brought home when he'd been away at a conference; but there was a time when I bought them on holidays. Some years ago, my mother gave me a tall, skinny cabinet for them. I've not added to the collection in many years; but, as long as I have room, I've no intention of throwing them out. Some are beautiful, some are intriguing, and all are ones I've had for decades.

I've always been the collecting type. When I was a kid, it was stamps and coins, pebbles and seashells, and various inexpensive ornaments that got picked up on holidays or given to me as presents.

Nowadays, I collect small animal figurines.

Also borrowed from toujours_nigel (here). This time, the idea is to put up the last line of each of the last ten stories I have posted.

So here goes:( Read more... )

Borrowed once again from toujours_nigel, whose own is here. We did this last year, didn't we? What goes around....

The idea is to put up the first line of each of the last ten stories I have posted, and see if there are any commonalities or patterns. Going back ten takes me right where I left off last year. How tidy.

So here goes:( Read more... )

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.

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Copped off toujours_nigel, who got it from lilliburlero.

Rules: Go to your AO3 works page, expand all the filters, and answer the following questions!

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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.

( Read more... )

When I did this last year, I wrote, "All in all, an adequate but not very exciting showing. I'm reasonably pleased with what I wrote; but I had a hard time getting fingertips to keyboard."

This year I wrote the same number of stories as last year, i.e. fourteen. A number of these were fairly short, including all five of my Yuletide fic. On the other hand, I did quite a long story for the Worldbuilding Exchange; and I think that my FK Fic Fest story, which touched on things that recalled the months after my mother died, turned out well—though some passages took a fair bit out of me.

Sadly, only two stories were Forever Knight, largely because I was the only person requesting it in most exchanges—even Yuletide this year, for which it's always been a hardy perennial. Similarly, I only wrote two stories based on Mary Renault's The Charioteer: the Renault Exchange didn't run again this year; and it's another fandom not much requested, except for Yuletide. On the other hand, this year I wrote several stories for the CW Arrowverse series, particularly The Flash. I've watched those shows since they started, but really only got into them—especially Flash and Legends—a little over a year ago. In addition, I wrote the usual miscellany of odds and ends, some of which are in fandoms that I've never written in before and likely never will again. Yuletide, in particular, always generates a few intriguing rarelit prompts, not to mention weird nonce fandoms. (I mean, battle snails?!!!.) I had fun with those little Yulefic.

Unfortunately, I have to admit the last part of what I wrote last year remains unchanged. Actually getting down to write was sometimes quite difficult. All of the stories were written for gift exchanges: the deadline was very helpful in, eventually, getting my fingertips dancing over the keyboard. Having someone else depending on me to write for them drives me to duty. Fortunately, once I do actually get down to writing, things generally come more easily. It's the getting started....

So doing gift exchanges gets me writing. On the other hand, there's a negative side: one's energy is taken up with writing to other people's prompts. I have a backlog of plot bunnies; and some of them would need fairly long stories to do them justice. Yes: I have a touch of writer's block. Some of that—though only some of that—comes from prompts that I find it hard to come up with an idea for, which in turn leads me to find RL reasons to do anything else but start writing. That I have finally had bookshelves installed in my mother's old bedroom and been shifting boxes round and unpacking means that there's always something else I can justify doing.

At any rate, last year I did Chocolate Box, the Worldbuilding Exchange, Exchange at Fic Corner, Everywoman, Trick or Treat, and Yuletide, as well as picking up a pinch hit for the new Multifandom Trope Fest. Plus, of course, FK Fic Fest: it's now my only fandom-specific exchange. This suggests that I should maybe sign up for fewer gift exchanges, and instead look for treats and pinch hits. Inspiration + deadline may result in less procrastination. For example, the long story I did for the Worldbuilding Exchange was actually an idea that I'd been working out for several months before I signed up. Obviously, I was fortunate in its matching my recipient's wishes. However, if I pick and choose prompts related to stories I already want to write, perhaps I'll be able to get more plot bunnies winkled out of the warren.

Mind you, I do still have an absurd amount sorting and unpacking yet to do around here. Moving in with my mother started five years ago; and she died three years ago. This seems a never-ending process. Then again, I've had two households' worth of goods to reduce to one. It's maybe not so surprising that it takes time.

The last few months have been complicated by the demise of my PC. As a result, I'm using my mother's old laptop. Eventually, of course, I need to buy a new computer; but, as I have other calls on my resources, I'm putting it off for now. As I still haven't put Filezilla on the laptop, I haven't made webpages for the stories written recently. So those stories have only one link.

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