I've been pretty remiss over the past few years in writing about the new pages on my website. However, I recently added the page for "Limner", the story I wrote for this year's fkficfest. We got nine stories, all of them good'uns. Check them out!

"Limner" is set in a monastery in the thirteenth century; and I wanted the design to reflect this.

For the main background, I decided to use a graphic of ceramic tiles somewhat resembling those one might find in a medieval building. I found that I had to tweak the original, since it didn't display properly: the edges mated up all right, but the shading on the red-brown areas hadn't been blended properly and left lines where the graphic repeated across and down the page. I fixed that by flipping it multiple times and joining the whole thing together: the result is four times the size of the original, but "tiles" properly.

Then, instead of my usual central panel with a fancy border, I decided to use a sort of triptych design with panels of coloured church-style windows on either side of the story. This meant that I had to be careful when specifying the size of all the sections (and I haven't tried it out on different browsers); but I hope it works okay.

At the top, I added a picture of partly ground pigment. I got it from Wikimedia Commons, and then wiped out the background in the photo. I think I got it pretty well, especially since it's been scaled down quite a bit. The protagonist is a monk illuminating a manuscript; and the process is sketched in as the story progresses. I was lucky enough to find a picture in which the heap of pigment is red (like the demon the monk is painting). Almost the entire pile is in the photo; so I only had to shift a few grains around to get it to look right.

The monk is never named in the story. In fact, brightknightie contacted me to check if this was an accidental omission. However, I assured her it was deliberate: I wanted readers to figure it out as they read. She was very careful not to let the secret out!   :)   Comments on AO3 suggest that the stratagem was effective.

If you like superheroes (and especially if you like hero/villain relationships) let me recommend the gift I got for this year's Chocolate Box Gift Exchange. "Villainous Tendencies", by MagicaDraconia16, is a delightful conversation between a retired hero and a reformed villain who, however attached they may be to one another, still cannot quite throw off the past. Short but very cute.

The story i wrote, "The Doctors Pierce", is a M*A*S*H story. My recipient, tjs_whatnot, is a big Hawkeye fan, and requested any of several gen pairings, including Hawkeye and his father.

I angled a bit to be assigned to them so that I could write a sequel to "Crabapple Cove", which I wrote for last year's retrotvexchange. However, the connection between the two stories is more a matter of head canon. "Crabapple Cove" covered the first days of Hawkeye's return; "The Doctors Pierce" takes place in the New Year, when Hawkeye has more or less settled in to working with his father in the family practice. It can certainly be read as a stand-alone.

Winter features largely in the story; so, for the webpage, I picked a main background of snowy branches, with only a touch of gilded green in the frame around the text.

Challenge #10:   In your own space, rec a fanwork (fic, art, vid, playlist, anything!) you did not create.

I decided to rec Forever Knight fic; and then had a tricky question to answer, since there are a few thousand of them now. Not on AO3; but, if you go back to the old archives, then there certainly are—plus, of course, the new ones. So I decided to limit it to LK stories. And then, having read through a few (and there are more than just a few!), it seemed best to stick to a single theme. So here a a couple of stories that follow the series finale, "Last Knight", but require a measure of detective work from a lone survivor.

Angst is one thing; and I don't deny there are some good examples out there. However, I do like me some plot with my fic.

Dorothy Elggren's "All The Rest Is Silence" is, of course, the classic of the type. Set immediately after "Last Knight", a grieving Captain Reese tries to puzzle out the mystery of what exactly did happen in Nick's loft that fateful day.

On the other hand, brightknightie's "Corners of the Mind" is predicated on Tracy's survival with amnesia about the year she worked with Nick, until a series of odd events bring on nightmares that point to a forgotten secret.

Challenge #6  In your own space, create something.

Challenge #8   In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year.

For a number of years now, I've been tweaking background tiles to create new ones. Most of them came from the now-defunct GRSites.com; and I used their software for some of the modifications, along with Microsoft Picture Manager. For the past several months, the graphics I've been working with have been based on one called (on that site) beige208.jpg. This is the original graphic:



I've made many variations, some of which have already been used on my website. At first, as with "Fairies of the Orchard", it was more a question of intensifying and slightly colour-shifting the original. Then, as in "Back in the Saddle" and "Professional Courtesies", it was a matter of applying filters. More recently, though, I've managed to get the graphic to shift in more malleable ways. For example, the graphic I used on "Grand Old School, Second to None" (written last Yuletide), involved the use of a filter to both darken the band across the graphic and augment the background colour.

Here is a selection of others, some made last year and some just this past month. If you click on the graphic, you can see how it tiles:

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.

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Challenge #9

What are your top five fandoms for 2021 based on the amount of time you interacted with them?
1. DC's Arrowverse (specifically, Flash and LoT)
2. Forever Knight
3. Time Team
4. WKRP in Cinncinnati
5. Century City

What are your top five fandom spaces in terms of time spent? (AO3, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Dreamwidth, and others)
1. Dreamwidth
2. AO3
3. Fanlore
4. Youtube (rewatching old series)
5. Wikia (Fandom) wikis

What are the top five ways you interacted in these fandoms? (Reading fanfic, writing, commenting, watching videos, chatting with friends, making art, or anything else you can think of).
1. reading fanfic
2. writing
3. making webpages for my stories
4. rewatching canon
5. editing wiki articles

What are the top five things you did to contribute to fandom in terms of time? Did you write? Comment? Send positive energy into the universe? Create art?
1. thinking/planning fanfic, mulling over canon
2. taking part in fanfic gift exchanges
3. creating background graphics to (potentially) use on webpages
4. editing wiki articles
5. did the 25 Days of Writing meme, also the Snowflake and Sunshine Challenges

What things did you create that took the most time?
1. "If Well Lived"
2. "Crabapple Cove"
3. "The Mystery of Mantlemass"
4. "Stone Cold"
5. partly written sequel to "If Well Lived"

Five oldies-but-goodies I've been rewatching (generally on Youtube):
1. Time Team
2. WKRP in Cinncinnati
3. Man About the House
4. Century City
5. Walking with Dinosaurs (and sequels)

In your own space, tell us about 3 fandom resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom!)

The article, "Predicting the preservation of cultural artefacts and buried materials in soil" by Mark Kibblewhite, Gergely Tóth, and Tamás Hermann, covers the preservation in various types of soil of bones, teeth and shells; ceramics, glass and phytoliths; organic materials; various metals; and stone and plaster. There are also sections on stratigraphy and soil properties.

I found this to be invaluable in writing my Yuletide treat, "The Mystery of Mantlemass"; and I suspect it would be useful not only for anyone else writing fanfic that involves archaeology but also for people writing casefic, especially involving a cold case.

Challenge #4:  In your own space, make a list of things that you wish existed in fandom or elsewhere, and/or that you'd like someone to create or do for you.

Challenge #5:  In your own space, talk about an idea you wish you had the time / talent / energy to do.

I have a lot of unwritten plot bunnies. Occasionally, there's almost immediately an exchange in which the idea fits closely to someone's prompt (and doesn't hit any DNWs), so I get it written quickly. Or I get the idea a bit late to write that time, but the same person makes the same request in a subsequent exchange; so I do it then.

Other plots linger for years. Most frustrating, perhaps, are the ones that get only partly written, but are too large for the time/energy available. A chunk gets cut off, trimmed to a conclusion, and posted; but the rest of the story just frets away at me.

Once upon a time, I was a self-starter. However, for years now, I have felt an enormous inertia that makes it hard to write without the sort of strong motivation provided by a gift exchange, i.e. a deadline by which it has to be done, someone (the recip) expecting it to be done so they can read it, and a fair dose of guilt because someone else is writing for me and I have to pay for my gift. The trouble is, of course, that when one signs up for an exchange, one probably won't get an assignment that fits anything in the ever-enlarging plot warren.

What I need, therefore, is someone to keep my nose more or less near the grindstone: "accountability buddy" is the phrase used in Challenge #4. In 2020 there was fearbuddies: it helped me write the next two ficlets in a series I started for worldbuildingex; but I ran out of time to finish the whole thing. Then late last year, I heard of mini_wrimo, only that won't run again till the fall.

I don't need a beta, or even a cheerleader. What I need is basically what Fear Buddies gave me: someone to send installments to, say twice a week. They don't have to read them, you understand. I just need the deadline, however little I actually get done; and I need someone at the other end whose mere existence makes me feel guilty.

Which brings me to Challenge #5.

As I said above, between worldbuildingex and fearbuddies I've done the first five ficlets (or chapters) of an Arrowverse backstory about Leonard Snart's childhood and youth. Also the first couple of stories in an even more ambitious sequence about the Flash rescuing him from the Oculus explosion, after which he returns to Central City and starts the Rogues. I'd kind of like to finish both of them.

But I'm not going to even mention anything in other fandoms. That's quite enough to be getting along with. (More than enough, really, on past form.)

When reading, on the whole I tend to avoid AUs, fusions, and crossovers—I see fusions as more like crossovers, so I'm putting in all three—except for divergent AUs. It is often intriguing to see alternative paths the characters might have taken had things worked out otherwise. On the other hand, I tend to avoid most of the college/fairy tale/omegaverse type of thing. Well, unless it's an author I otherwise trust.

Perversely, I've written some fusions myself. I like to do them straight. The latest one, "The Mystery of Mantlemass", fuses Time Team with Barbara Willard's Chronicles of Mantlemass. The story runs from the first letter to post-production, as the archeologists locate the long-lost manor and foundry from Willard's multi-generational YA historical series.

I think, when I am bitten by a notion that requires a fusion, the impetus is much the same as it is with any other persistent plot bunny: there's something that wants to be said.

Willard's final story in the series, "One of Us", is set at the time of publication (1981); and its theme is the loss of family history, since practically nothing remains from the 150-odd years covered in the series. As I reread the books last fall, though, it occurred to me that more might actually be discovered than Willard realized. The involvement of Time Team was obvious. Fortunately, there was a very prompt prompt in Yuletide; so I was inspired to write it all out as a treat.

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 stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen. DNW non-canon / relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.


• 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. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (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. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.
  

REQUESTS: ( Read more... )

So last year I wrote this post about goals for the Snowflake Challenge and ... um ... got nothing of it done. Prognosis is poor, therefore, for setting goals this year.

Yes, I would like to finish the stories I mentioned last January. Sadly, fearbuddies. only ran in 2020; and I clearly do need a deadline to write. At any rate, in 2021 I got some stories finished; but it was always in the context of a gift exchange, i.e. someone to write for, and a date I had to post by.

In December, my goal was to get the Christmas tree up and baking done by the time my sister visited. As heavy fruit cakes need to be done in advance, the ingredients for the currant Dundee I planned to make were set out on the kitchen counter so that they would remind me reproachfully every time I went in. Let's just say that they were put away so my sister could get Christmas dinner made, and the tree was finally finished last weekend, just in time for her to see it fully dressed before she went home.

So my first goal is to get that cake baked. There's a bowl of currants wanting batter to be stirred into.

This has been another depressing year. COVID, of course; but I've also had health problems—nothing serious, but joints can be quite uncomfortable when they decide to be. It's also not been a very productive year, fannishly speaking. Of course, compared with the flurry of ficlets in 2020, this year's output would pretty well have to be fewer in number. However, though most of the stories have been a more typical length, I've definitely not written as many as usual.

On the whole, I'd have to say the highlight of the year has been the gifts I received. Four for Trick or Treat! All of them delightful. Two for Yuletide, including a New Tricks Brian/Esther fic that I've been requesting in various exchanges for quite a while: utterly in character, everyone's voice spot on. Seriously, people have been generous and talented; and I appreciated the lot.

Add in Flo's Christmas visit, and it's fair to say the year did end well. :)

Anyway, here's what I wrote in 2021:

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With this year's authors now revealed, I can say unreservedly that trickortreatex was fantastic this year. My bag was full. Not only did I got a delightful gift but three treats, all of which were very tasty morsels indeed.

From the date, my official gift must be "It's Not Easy Being a Superhero on Halloween" by Silex. It's an Original Work written to the character/prompt, "Superpowered Character on Halloween Annoyed at Passersby Insisting Their Costume is Inaccurate". As Crimson Charger discovers, trying to stake out a convention full of cosplayers presents unexpected difficulties.

Until the last minute, I thought that this would be my only gift. However, when the collection opened, it turned out that I had three last-minute treats:

• "What's Possible" by wherewolf is another Original Work, written for the character/prompt "Protective Sidekick to Superhero Losing his Powers".
• "Acid Test" by entwashian is a story about the Arrowverse Leonard Snart cheering up his sister, Lisa, when no one recognizes her costume.
• "Trick or Treating" by ChokolatteJedi is a M*A*S*H Halloween story.

All are short and sweet, and I recommend them heartily!

As for my own assignment: I wrote "Zari on Zari" for cicerothecat, who had requested a story about Zari Tomaz & Zari Tarazi from Legends of Tomorrow. As these are two versions of the same character from different time lines, they can only appear alternately on board the Waverider, the other one being bound inside the jointly-owned air totem that gives them their powers. Rather than contrive a meeting in the totem!world, I decided to have each of them alternately spill opinions about the other. They are very different people—as one ought to expect, given their radically different life experiences.

The webpage for the story is now up on my site here. I went with the green background that I've been using for most of my Legends stories, and decided to snip out the air totem from a screencap to use as the divider between each character's comments. As it's red, I added some red tones to the frame around the story.

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 stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.


• 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. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (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 definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.
  

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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. They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.

I'm also greerwatson on AO3.


GENERAL POINTS:

• I love stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.


• 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. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (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, for that matter, a serious story with comic interludes.


• No second-person fic, please. First person is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.
  

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The annual Halloween fanfic gift exchange, trickortreatex, is currently in nominations (ending on the 8th).

This is a low-key exchange with a 300-word minimum. There is a new mod this year who is allowing people to nominate up to 10 fandoms with up to 10 characters and/or pairings in each. Nominate here.

Lots of fun! I've done it for several years now.

Meme taken from lightbird.

1. How many works do you have on AO3?
236

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?
463,012 words

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?
45 or so

Main fandoms: Forever Knight (91), The Charioteer (40 + 42 ITOWverse stories), DC's Arrowverse (13)

Gift exchange regulars: Jean Robertson series (5), Swallows and Amazons series (5), M*A*S*H (5)

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I don't always do the everywoman exchange. In the last couple of years I've felt a lack of possible recipients to write for. This year, however, was different: I actually had multiple possible matches, and wound up writing two stories.

My gift, "For the Living", was written by brightknightie. Despite the usual anon period, I had no doubt of my author. Her footnoting style is very distinctive. (Not that I said anything, of course.) It's a marvellous slice-of-life fic about Natalie and Grace, set at work in the Coroner Building. Multiple cases are described, each different and demanding a different response. Although there isn't a lot of medical detail, Amy did a lot of research into the daily routine of a pathologist's duties and the way a lab like that is run. She also tied her story into canon, picking up on Natalie's comment in "Cherry Blossoms" about staff cuts and applying that to Eddie, the morgue attendant from "Only the Lonely", who also appears in the story.

If you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend it. As always, Amy's done a crackerjack job.

My own assigned recipient was my sister, fawatson. To put her off the trail, I told her I was writing for Amy. Which I was; but, of course, as a treat. I don't think Flo guessed the truth until the collection opened, at which point she discovered that there were two FK stories and only one gift for her. "A Day in the Life" is based on Mary Renault's The Charioteer. Among other things, she'd asked for a story about the hero's mother's housekeeper (a very minor off-scene character in the book) and her relationship with her employer (who is a very sweet, decidedly manipulative woman). As I put it in the story summary, "No man is a hero to his valet. Nor woman to her housekeeper." Mrs Timmings has few illusions. The background is World War II, of course; but it becomes clear that I've set the story during one particular period shortly before the main action of the book, making it backstory of a sort.

As for the treat for brightknightie (which was actually written first), "Sunny Days, Sunny Ways" is about Tracy—both her relationship with her (numerous!) family and her friendship with Vachon. Amy had said, "I think that the series started out trying to make her contrast with Nick, as Schanke did, but ended up paralleling them instead, and never fully grappled with what that change offered to the larger story." As the third season progressed, TPTB shifted from really using the full group of new characters to just sticking Tracy in the position of "Nick's new partner". I suppose her relationship with her father, her mother, and the apparently enormous Vetter clan substitutes for Schanke's family; but her friendship with Vachon was almost dropped for a while, and could have been profitably elaborated in contrast with Nick's work romance with Natalie. In the story, Tracy bitches to him about her mother's insistence she spend the Labour Day holiday with her instead of attending the usual big Vetter bash.

Both stories are now uploaded to my website. "Sunny Days, Sunny Ways" has a yellow-themed design, with a turbulent background reflecting Tracy's annoyance with her family, and a gold & white gradient carefully positioned to give a "sun" within the border round the story itself. "A Day in the Life" has a sort of old-fashioned wallpaper design (from Ambographics Art) in lavender and tan, with a rather demure border round the story. As the story takes place on the home front during the Dunkirk evacuation, I included a picture of one of the actual "little ships" involved, taken from Wikimedia Commons.

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'm also greerwatson on AO3.


GENERAL POINTS:

• I love stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.


• 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. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (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 definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.
  

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Prompt 7: Zephyrus

The child of Dawn (Eos) and the Titan Astraeus, Zephyrus represents the West wind. Zephyrus was considered to be the gentlest of the Anemoi (wind gods representing the cardinal points of the compass), and the beneficial bringer of Spring. The gentle springtime winds of the West indicated an end to Winter and the new growth of plants and flowers.

Spring in summer?

I'm going to rec two stories I wrote a while back; or, if you don't want to bother with the actual fic, then just have a peek at the webpage design. *g*

"Fairies of the Orchard" is a little Flower Fairies treat that I wrote for Yuletide one year. The fairy in question is the Apple-blossom Fairy—or is it? There's a touch of John Barleycorn to this tale, as blossoms turn to fruit and the fairy undergoes a metamorphosis. (On AO3.)

Applefic started as a series of ficlets based on Mary Renault's The Charioteer. The name has its own history: basically, that I couldn't come up with a title, kept referring to it as "my applefic", and got so in the habit that I finally just made that the title. It has a sort of dual time to it: each chapter is set consecutively round the calendar and each describes an incident in the hero's life from early childhood (when he first moves to the village), through older childhood and his teen years, until he finally moves out of the cottage for good after World War II, i.e. after the timeframe of the book. On my website, each chapter has its own apple-themed design, season by season; and, since it begins and ends in spring, the first and last both have the same apple-blossom background. (On AO3.)

Both stories have this in common: spring leads to summer, thence to fall and winter, and so round the calendar. And then comes the following year.