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Fiction Listing

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Fiction, 2014 - Yuletide and more
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Yuletide was wonderful - it's the first time this year I've really felt able to write, you know? Although I should mention to you that I have been unfairly shirking irradiant's J2, so that's next on the list. But...
In which I talk far too much about writing fiction rather than actually writing fiction.Collapse )


It's time for some more lemsip. Happy New Year, people!

Last of the year - recs, Yuletide and otherwise (the cold and caves update)
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Last rec post of 2014. Happy Hogmanay!

General Recs:

Hamlet - Shakespeare, HIghlander, Hockey RPF, Inglourious Basterds (2009), The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, Marvel 616, Teen Wolf
Other recsCollapse )


Yuletide Recs:

80 Days (Video Game 2014), A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess, The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje, Fiddler on the Roof - Bock/Harnick/Stein, Gun Street Girl (song) - Tom Waits, Ivanhoe - All Media Types, King Rat - James Clavell, Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
YuletideCollapse )
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Yuletide recs!
Peacock
tryfanstone
Yuletide recs!Collapse )



14th Century CE England RPF, Bacchae - Euripides, Cable and Deadpool, Cloudburst at Shingle Street - Thomas Dolby (Song), Flight of the Heron - D. K. Broster, House of Niccolò - Dorothy Dunnett, Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose, James I: The Key Will Keep the Lock - Munro, The Pacific, Pride (2014), Tigana - Guy Gavriel Kay, Unusual Dragon Hoards - iguanamouth, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen - Alan Garner, Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall, Y Gwyll | Hinterland
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Exchange season!
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Highlander! hlh_shortcuts is open for sign-ups, people: my favourite fiction exchange for my best-loved fandom. It's only 500 words minimum! You can squeeze it in! Meeethos!

...having said that, given that I'm not really up for social stuff right now, I've already said to ace ringmistress amand_r that I will pinch hit anything (and will end up so doing) but don't want to, you know, actually exchange with its letters and posts and stuff, so I feel horribly guilty advertising the thing to you. Honestly, this year would have been the mother of all DNW letters, so really, best left to next year. Same goes for yuletide, although hoping to write treats does mean that I really, really need to get stuck into the fandomaid fic I still owe. Before sign-ups! There is a plan!

...now, hm, I think I need to clean the windows...and the sink...

Then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you
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Thoughts.Collapse )
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In the mountains, there you feel free.
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Unovis here, posting for Jay.

On Sunday, May 11, Jay's beloved father died at home.

She appreciates your thoughts and support, but is unable at present to respond to comments or e-mail. She'll return online soon, to speak herself.

We all wish her well.

Breaking Radio Silence: Fic
Peacock
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OMG finished.

This is not my story. This is my father's epic Swallows and Amazons novel, all 228261 words of it, which I have been editing on and off for the last two years and intensively over the last five weeks. People, I was pretty desperate to get this story posted as soon as possible, and I'm very happy to say that my father will indeed see it today on-line.

In all honesty, you'd have to be an outright fan of Swallows and Amazons and/or my dad (luckily, I am both) to read the whole thing. Dad took "show don't tell" to heart, created the Mary Sue to rival all Mary Sues in his Titty, and somehow managed to write a entire chapter about accountancy. However, he also wrote at length about walking and climbing in his beloved Lake District and in Scotland, about sailing off the East Coast, and rather poignantly, about Cambridge University, because my father could not go to university and instead earned his qualifications the hard way.

So I can tell you that I'm particularly fond of the later parts of Chapter 7, a lovely evocation of sailing off the Suffolk and Essex coastlines, and also of the beginning of Chapter 14, where Titty rescues one of her climbing companions.

Book One, on AO3.

Books two and three exist in notes only, but at some point I will try and pull those summaries together.

In other news...I haven't even looked at my in-box for a week and a half now, but will try catching up this week. Slowly, it's taken three hours to post this entry here and on Dreamwidth.

Hope very much all is well with you.
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State of play
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I will be absent from fandom until further notice. This is not a permanent hiatus, but it will be a lengthy one, and I am exceedingly unlikely to be able to answer comments or e-mails. I'm truly sorry if you're waiting on comment or reply, or will be.

/comments disabled. It's not that I don't value you, I do, but I truly do not have time to answer.

Watching ice-hockey in Moscow
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People, q_i and I went to Russia. We came back yesterday from Saint Petersberg - the sun was shining, but all the flights to Kiev were cancelled.

This post, though, is about small, stunning moments of beauty in a country I loved.

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our address books for so long a slow scramble / now are palimpsests
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 Recs! (Pease don't ask about the writing just now. It will be fine.)


Recs: Football RPF, Generation Kill, Hockey RPF, KAT-TUN (Akame), Marvel, My Chemical Romance, National Football League RPF, Original Fiction, Rise of the Guardians and Guardians of Childhood, Supernatural, The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, Teen WolfCollapse )

Eh, AWOL for a while from Friday. Even more than now.
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OK, so....
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People, it was merriman who wrote the absolutely gorgeous Deaccession for me in hlh_shortcuts. It's on AO3 now, too - books in space! How can you resist? Although in all honesty my favourite part of this story is merriman's superb re-imagining of the Library of Alexandria - it's just gorgeous.

Summing up in brief, the months before Christmas were, frankly, pretty grim for writing. I feel I totally short-changed pat_t (who wrote the really superb Escape from Purgatory for me a couple of years ago, Highlander/SPN) with An Incomplete Lexicon of Unwarrented Festivaties (Duncan/Methos), and managed a last-minute solitary pinch-hit for yuletide (Twa Turtledoves and a Cockerel in Clover) for aurilly, who asked for Dunnett, Francis Crawford/Christian Stewart, if Christian had lived. The prompt was so good, irresistible. And I did manage that Marillion treat as well - Punchline, for  athersgeo. I did not, I swear, set out to write lyrics!

In retrospect, I'm really glad I didn't actually sign up properly for yuletide. My father has had shingles, really badly. I was with parents in Penrith for two weeks at the end of Oct, and have been there every weekend since: it is awful, absolutely awful, to see someone you love in such pain and be unable to do anything to help. He says he actually can't remember anything from the end of October to mid December, and...I'm really glad he can't. He's in less pain now, out of bed, thinking about the model railway and the S&A novel - much better.

That made writing difficult. (I smile: understatement.) I'm hoping things will be better this year, and although have effectively had to drop out of smallfandombang, I have not given up hope on this story. 2014 will be the year I finally write Generation Kill!

 - Happy New Year, people. I hope it's unexpectedly and bountifully great for you!

Yuletide recs
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AO3 remains the only bibliographic index user of which I am aware that, infuriatingly, continues to list books under title and not author's surname as a primary reference. Grumpily, I've done the same here.

Recs:

Recs in: Zhuāngzǐ, Appalachian Murder Ballads, Black Sheep, The Charioteer, The Eagle, Edward II, The Fast and the Furious, Frankenstein, The Hour, Irish Mythology, The Losers, Maiden Rose, Moby Dick, The Outsiders, The Romance of Silence, Roustabout, Rush, Stalky and Co, The Sting, Swallowa and Amazons, Swordspoint, The WireCollapse )
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I haven't got a lot to give, but what I've got I'll give to you
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Starting with Highlander!

If you didn't know already, the annual Highlander exchange fest hlh_shortcuts is posting at the moment, and I woke up this morning to the most glorious story! I'm going to summarise it as BOOKS IN SPACE! But you also need to know that it has an entirely gorgeous and equally corrupt space-age Alexandrian Library, and all sorts of filing systems, and complicated shenanighans with Amanda being awesome, and moments of heart-wrenching pathos to balance the shining adventure of the thing - oh, and Methos! It has Methos, with library, too. And it's pretty much all I could desire for Christmas, and if you'd like it too, you'll find it here - Deaccession.

Otherwise, other recs:

Recs: The Fast and the Furious, Hockey RPF, J2, The Last Unicorn, Marvel, original fiction, Star Trek RPF, Supernatural, Swordspoint, Teen WolfCollapse )

- Happy Holidays, people: Happy Christmas to those who celebrate.
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Fic: Blowing Soap Bubbles at the South Pole (Marvel, Steve/Tony)
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Fandom: Marvel. 616.
Pairing: Steve/Tony
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 25,000

Summary: Forty-eight hours: a graphic novel. 616 universe, futurefic, AU from the end of Stark Disassembled. Written for the cap_ironman big bang 2013.

Art: avienica produced two lovely illustrations for this story - posted here.

Beta: So very many thanks to doro, who stood stalwart and exact in the face of everything I threw at her for this story, with its triumph of style over structure, its finickity formatting and its miserable lack of plot. Thanks too to the anonymous helper who made this story, in its early stages, so very much better than it was to begin with.



Blowing Soap Bubbles at the South Pole

website | AO3


- I can't make AO3 justify right: this story appears as it is supposed to on the website link.

Fandomaid - Typhoon Haiyan
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fandomaid's buy-it-now Philippines fundraiser is currently running here, with the list of approved organisations for donations here. There are some amazing authors and artists and craftspeople offering aidgifts, and I've just signed up here. As usual, if you're at all interested, I'll be late (possibly very late, although next year's not too bad right now for fic committments) but I will deliver.

I'm truly sorry if you all know this already - I'm a little tangled in family stuff here in Penrith. Hoping to be home and around online a little more next week, but at the moment everything's a little unsure and ragged around the edges.
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Fic: The Mountain (Marvel, Steve/Tony)
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Fandom: Marvel. Movieverse.
Pairing: Steve/Tony
Rating: R
Wordcount: 36,000

Summary: Sixty-two days without a single blade of grass, four hundred pitons, twenty-three stoves, six down-filled suits and a moth-eaten bow-tie. Summer 1968: Tony Stark vs. The Mountain. Written for the marvel_bang 2013.

Art: zephre created the gorgeous artwork, the image of Steve in the ice you see below and the one of Bruce's life-saving belay in the story, and posted about it here and here on AO3.

Beta: So many thanks to doro, working once again in a fandom she doesn't read and with an utterly distracted author. She works miracles.






The Mountain

website | AO3

Armistice Day, 2013.
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- night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
            And some who have just returned from the border say
            there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.


Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

Incunabula
Peacock
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A very long time ago, back when mementis and I were working on standing on the edge of nothing, we had a discussion about Generation Kill. I'd never seen the series, but I thought then and I think now that the fiction produced for this fandom is extraordinary. And because I was working with 1920s San Francisco at the time, it seemed a very short leap to thinking writing 1940s LA for this fandom (Hooker/Biker AU, post second world war) would be equally easy. Nearly two years later, I'm finally ready to write the story we were talking about then, but my schedule is brutal. I can do a 10K rough draft of a historical AU when I haven't yet seen the canon, in the gap between hlh_shortcuts and  yuletide deadlines and Jan 31st, no?

I can try. Pimping anyway: smallfandombang. I signed up late, you've got ten days. Sign-ups close Oct 31st.







Photobucket

A 10,000-word big bang for small fandoms!

FAQ | Rules | Authors | Beta/Cheerleader | Affiliate





On the subject of extraordinary fiction, recs:

Recs: Generation Kill, Hockey RPF, Marvel, Road Movie to Berlin - They Might Be Giants (Song:Jukebox), Teen WolfCollapse )

excursions and adventuresCollapse )

BIG MEN WITH BIG SWORDS (and chips on their shoulders)
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The annual Highlander exchange hlh_shortcuts is almost ready to go - there's a day left to sign up, people. This is my favourite fest of the year, and in all honesty all the usual suspects have signed up already, but if you've ever considered writing Highlander you couldn't start in a better place! Sign-ups are here - it's dead easy, a 500 word minimum.

 - and if you're on my f-list and you're responsible for requesting the album from that band formed in Aylesbury in 1979, please hurry up and post your DYW letter to the yuletide_admin DYW post!

It's getting late in the game to show any pride or shame / Burn a little brighter now
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State of play:

yuletide, people. FYI. (Not that it really matters, just in case anyone wanders over from AO3.) Last year's yuletide was pretty much amazing - isiscolo's Minstrel's Song (Rosemary Sutcliff's Knight's Fee) was a story I absolutely loved to pieces. Still do, not to take away from all the smashing stories that preceeded it - and I wrote more than I'd ever done before, loving the freedom so to do. This year... eh, I've never had a problem writing, but I struggle to find enough fandoms to request. So this year, I'm not signing up, I'm just writing treats.

Work was utterly brutal. Work will continue to be a litttle brutal for the next two weeks at least, and I will continue to be slow responding to e-mails and comments. I'm truly sorry if this affects you. (Yes, I'm looking at you, holiday people and Lost Prince people and Steve/Tony AO3 people.)

However, by some minor miracle (actually that's heroic beta Doro, if I'm honest) she and I do seem to have managed, so far, both marvel_bang and c_im_bigbang. These two stories need serious additional umph. But, they're in. :)


Not really fiction recs:

Recs: Highlander, Lost Prince, Baked GoodsCollapse )


Fiction Recs:

Recs: Due South, Highlander, Hockey RPF, Marvel, Panic!at the Disco, Skyfall, Supernatural, Supernatural RPF, Teen Wolf, X-Men: First ClassCollapse )
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No, really, the sky is falling in
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sky ceiling. Today's great event on the work front.

I haven't a hope in hell of answering e-mails or comments for at least another week and probably two. If you e-mailed and I haven't replied, I'm sorry. I'll get to you, and if it's time sensitive I am even more sorry. It's just not possible right now. I *am* hoping to take Saturday afternoon off, but if that happens it'll be a last-minute desperate attempt to add at least a hundred more words to a fest story squeaking through word count.

/comments disabled, apologies. State of the week.

Last dance with Mary Jane (Strictly Minimalist Pimp Post from Very Tired Person)
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Recs:

Recs: American Idol RPF, Figure Skating RPF, Historical RPF, Hockey RPF, Marvel, Supernatural, Supernatural RPF, Teen WolfCollapse )
Tags:

Four stories about writing
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(a) It seems to me that, if an author writes good fanfiction – and by that I mean fanfiction which is true to that author’s image of the characters, or to the setting, or both – then, almost by definition, that story as it is written is not going to be good original fiction. Fanfiction is by its very nature a collusive collaboration between reader and writer, a text of allusions and assumptions containing a shared vocabulary, accessible via an mutual understanding of the source from which the story came. Original fiction is, by its very nature, a separation between reader and writer across which both are seeking to create understanding, building bridges to each other. Fiction builds: fanfiction explores.

(b) When I read, I read more than one story in any piece of writing. There is the story, the overt plot, beginning, middle, end. Jane buys a new car. There is the story underlying that story, the bones of it: Jane’s journey, a story about materialism, or personal success, or fulfillment.

Then there is the story under those stories, the author’s unconscious assumption about any of those words being meaningful to the reader, the reader’s unconscious assumptions about the author’s words. The author writes Jane and sees a woman who is conventional and ordinary. The reader reads Jane and sees a woman with opportunities and potential. The author resents Jane’s mundanity, while the reader envies her security.

Here too is the story of the writing of the story, the memories and experiences, the overheard conversations and snatched images that the author drew on in the writing: the coffee that sped a paragraph or the telephone call that slowed it. And of the reading of the story, a shared experience or an adventure into the unknown, the early morning commute, fractured and tedious, or the slow unscrolling in the light of a bedside lantern.

No story is alone.

(c) I believe that once a story is written, it is its own thing. It is the product of the author’s life, but not the sum of it: the inhabitant of the reader’s imagination, but not the owner of it. A story stands on its own merits, to fly free or stumble and fall. It will speak to some people and not to others.

(d) This story, tonight’s story, is a collaborative work, because in it is every word I have ever read and every writer to whom I have ever spoken. In it are my first teacher’s grammar lessons and my last beta's exactitude, my father’s hands holding a coffee cup over a lunchtime table and the hiss of my computer’s fan. In it too is the quality of light on your screen as you read, and the way your hands hold the text: phone, tablet, screen, paper.

These words, tonight’s story, are not mine any more than they are yours, but they are ours.

This is why I tell stories.

But I'm good for one more try
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Stuff:

Posted: Afterwards (Steve/Tony, AO3 | website) from a prompt at capkink: So Steve and Tony are accidentally hit with some kind of death-ray but things go wrong and there are unexpected consequences. Steve has to come inside Tony at least once a day, everyday or else Tony has painful cramps/migraine/weakness/whatever that would eventually put him in a coma and kill him. So they reluctantly start a sexual relationship. Dubcon warning.

Tumblr: now as myself. Not fannish blogging.

Stuff that isn't fiction:
This post on reviewsbyjessie on self-publishing has a great summary on methods and resources. And, only a little sideways, I was really interested by this post, naraht on the erotics of nostagia. While I'm on the subject: antique-erotic: a fascinating collection of seriously vintage porn.

News:
Off-line, apologies, for the next month, or I'll never get anythng written - and you won't be surprised to hear I'm late on e-mails again. Only other news: finally, my bikes sync: my R6 passed her MOT on Thursday (and I might have just spent far too much on short-barred brake and clutch levers, because I'm old and my hands hurt, although OMG servicing a racing bike is EXPENSIVE) and the Katana goes in for hers at the end of next week. The garage promise her newly chromed front forks by Wednesday. Anyone who has been following the saga of rebuilding my classic vintage bike, please heave a sigh of relief with me - it's been years.

Recs:

Recs: Hockey RPF, James Bond (Skyfall), Marvel, Star Trek RPF, Teen WolfCollapse )