It's my posting day at Fall for S/X! I've just posted my story:

Longest. Day. Ever.

Rating: Mature
Pairing: Spike/Xander
Length: 14,000 words
Summary: I play with the Groundhog Day trope. Spike and Xander live with the consequences.
Disclaimer: They aren't mine, and I'm not making any money.



What with having a toddler and working overtime and all, this is the only complete story I've written this year. I actually wrote it over the summer and then held onto it until now so that I'd have something for Fall for S/X. Now I'm nervous as hell—I hope it's well-received!

In my latest attempt to efficiently keep track of good stuff I've read, I've just started up a Delicious account. (At http://delicious.com/shadow.fic, because "shadowscast" was already taken, can you believe it?!) Right now all I've got marked are three Harry/Draco post-series fics, because that's what I was reading over the weekend.

I've also done a little poking around at Delicious, and it seems pretty neat. For instance, I can see who else has bookmarked the same fics I've bookmarked, and then see what other fics those same people have bookmarked with similar tags. Nifty! This seems like a promising way to find good fics. (Or at least it will be the next time I have time to read again after today, which is looking like, um, Christmas. Oh well!)

But right away I saw a dilemma -- when you use the site this way, you see the summaries that everyone else has written for their bookmarks. Such as, for instance, details about the plots of stories.

If I write my bookmark summaries with an intended audience of me, I'm liable to include all sorts of plot spoilers for the stories (since I'm trying to give myself the ability to remember which story was which if I want to reread them years from now). On the other hand, if I keep my summaries non-spoilery as a courtesy to other people who might cruise my bookmarks looking for stuff to read, then I also have to make them less informative.

So what I'm wondering is -- is there some sort of established Delicious code of conduct? Rules of etiquette, unspoken or otherwise?

As per my recent habit, I'd like to let you know about a good fic that I read recently: The Worst Journey in the World, which shapinglight wrote for the Plot Without Porn ficathon. Post-NFA Buffy, Spike and Wesley, with sled dogs, bad weather, and a questionable plan. I enjoyed it very much.

***

So, Dreamwidth? How's that going? I still really like the idea of it, and the new reading filter functionality that they're promising to unroll this week sounds very cool, but from the looks of it, my actual flist is still pretty much LJ-based. So I guess my plan for now is to cross-post everything, and leave comments open everywhere. (On the rare occasions when I actually post, that is!)

***

Hey, I'm re-reading the Harry Potter series! I am now halfway through The Chamber of Secrets. I'm enjoying it very much. I'm getting much stronger fic-reading urges than I did the first time through—I think, when all is said and done, that I'm a closed-canon kind of girl. I like knowing the whole original story before I embark on the magical, neverending journey that is fanfic!

I don't think I'm likely to make the leap to writing Potterverse fic any time soon, though. Way too much work to figure out how to sound British enough. It's hard enough managing with Spike and Giles, and at least they're largely operating in an American environment. (Not that I'm American, either—but I can fake it much more easily!)

I was in the mood for Harry Potter tonight, partly because of seeing the new movie a few weeks ago and partly because I was just chatting about it with a couple of RL friends.

So I went browsing through crack_van, and found a story and a vid to enjoy.

The story is The Courtship of Benjamin Jink by atdelphi, and it's Snape/Slughorn slash (seriously!), and the writing is just lovely.

Let me show you a little bit!

( The story is set post-series, so don't click if you're still avoiding spoilers. )

Secondly, a vid: Beautiful Struggle by nightchik. It's a gen vid, not a shippy one, and I'm not sure how to describe it because I totally don't have a language for talking about vids. I just liked it.

***

By the way, I'm writing! I'm working on "That Good Night." It'll be a while still before I have anything ready to post, but I just wanted to let you know. It's not dead, it's just resting!

I'm sitting in an air-conditioned coffee shop drinking a coffee slushie that is probably going to keep me up way too late tonight. And I just wrote a drabble! I hope you like it.

The Happiest Day

They make it through the vows without a hitch. The kiss is beautiful, storybook. Not a dry eye in the house.

Floating across the dance floor with his new bride Buffy in his arms, Angel can’t remember ever feeling so happy before. So perfectly happy.

Later, once everybody’s wounds are bandaged and they’ve taken up a collection to reimburse Willow for the Orb of Thesulah, Angel sits down next to Spike on the steps out back.

Spike raises an eyebrow at him, lights a second cigarette. His knuckles are bloody.

“So,” Angel says, “Tell me about that demon in Africa.”

Yesterday, I completed a fic! ::insert squeal of glee::

It's a standalone Spike/Xander story in which I play with the Groundhog Day trope (a thing I've wanted to do since practically forever). And man, would I like to post it right now! But ... I think I'm gonna wait. I'd really like to participate in Fall For S/X (as I have every year since my Writercon 2 roommates talked me into it, even if in the Autumn of the Newborn Baby I only managed a tiny 200 word-ish slice of life thing in place of an actual fic). And I suspect I'm not going to have a chance to complete anything else before December 21st, keeping in mind my general inability to keep a fic down to less than 10,000 words!

So hey you guys, does anybody know for sure if Fall for S/X is happening this year?

Okay, in other news, as soon as I finished writing my own Spike/Xander story, I went off and read somebody else's! So now I have a rec for you:

Xander Harris vs Destiny by cordelianne, reremouse, and savoytruffle

Okay, not that there are probably many people on my flist who missed this when it first came out, but still! I just read it this morning, so I'm reccing it, darn it. It's a lighthearted, sexy road trip with a mystery built in. Or something like that, anyway! And it all makes sense in the end. (And oh man, now I understand the title!)

ETA: I have a Fall for S/X posting date—September 23rd. Woot!

Um hey, remember when I said that I'd be trying to keep up some kind of minimal level of fannish participation by posting little recs/reviews when I read stories? (That was two entries and two months ago, here.)

Turns out even that was more than I could manage so far, but I've finally got one!

Splinters of the Past by cdybedahl
fandom: Babylon 5

This story takes place after the end of the series. Susan Ivanova is awesome in it, perfectly in character. Her relationship with Talia Winters was something that we didn't see enough of in the TV series, and it ended horribly abruptly—this story builds plausibly upon what we saw onscreen, and finally provides a kind of closure.

This entry was originally posted at http://shadowscast.dreamwidth.org/101211.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Oh wow you guys, I just spent about three hours this afternoon writing fanfic. I went to a coffee shop and opened up my netbook and Spike and Xander came to life in my head, and I wrote. It was great. I've missed this so much.

The last-edited date on the file was June 15th, but I know it's been longer than that since I actually wrote, because I remember I just did a few line edits the last time I had the file open. I think the last time I did any real writing was in mid-April. Gah.

Writing is so hard, sometimes. You know what I'm talking about. Like slogging up a muddy hill in the pouring rain wearing a big wool sweater. But today it was more like taking a running start and sliding down the muddy hill, shrieking gleefully the whole time.

Except not with actual shrieking. My fellow coffee-shop patrons probably would've objected.

Anyway. Hooray for vacation!

This entry was originally posted at http://shadowscast.dreamwidth.org/100952.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I'm not writing much these days! (You'd noticed, right?)

So here's a plan I have for not being completely invisible in fandom—I'll make an effort to post a little rec whenever I read a good fic. Well, okay, whenever I read a good fic and then still have time and energy afterwards to write even a minimal post. Heh. Do not expect a sudden deluge of rec posts.

Today I read Air by ana_grrl. (I got the link off Crack Van, which is pretty much cheating, recs-wise. You forgive me, right?) It's a Firefly story—a short, sweet Kaylee/Inara slash fic set a little while after the movie.

Gosh I love Kaylee. And this fic captures her voice really nicely.

By the way, if you're reading my posts on Livejournal or Insanejournal, you might notice that I'm redirecting comments to Dreamwidth! So, yeah, this is what I've decided to do for now:

1) Crosspost completely (ie: Dreamwidth, Livejournal, Insanejournal).

2) For meta and general musings, redirect comments to Dreamwidth.

(Why? Well, in the event that any conversations happen in comments, I'd like them to be all in one place. The place where I have lots of icons to use.)

3) For fic (when I eventually get some more written), leave comments open everywhere.

(Why? Because I want to make leaving feedback as easy as possible. I mean seriously, if I could go to your house and do the typing for you while you lounged on your sofa eating grapes, I would.)

This entry was originally posted at http://shadowscast.dreamwidth.org/100781.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Hey look, I'm posting again! And it's about Star Trek, again!

Don't worry, it's not going to be All Star Trek, All The Time around here now; it's only that I just saw the new Star Trek movie, so it's fresh in my mind.

And here's a thing I've been thinking: I want the new Sulu to be gay.

( I will explain myself! )

I just saw the new Star Trek movie, and enjoyed it muchly.

So now I'm wondering where to go for a quick fix of meta and squee related to the movie. (I'm assuming there can't be much fic yet, but I'm sure there's some in the pipeline!) Thing is, what with Star Trek being pretty much the mother of all fandoms, I have no idea where to start looking! So, how 'bout it, my poor neglected flist; can you help me?

The last time I posted a chapter of That Good Night, I said that I hoped to update again in less than a year. I am happy to say that I have met that goal! Yippee! (Keeping the bar just high enough that I can comfortably walk under it.)

Thanks as always to yourlibrarian—beta-reader extraordinaire—and also to any readers out there who haven't given up on me yet!

( Previously in the Fragments-verse.... )


And now, the new chapter!

Title: That Good Night (part 13 of ?)
Rating: NC-17 (barely)
Pairing: Spike/Xander, ensemble
Summary: A couple of years post-NFA, Spike is human, and it isn’t working out so well. He and Xander are currently in Sao Paulo, where Willow has just had a baby and a new vampire problem is looming.
Warnings: This story will get dark at times. Definitely angsty, h/c with lots of hurt. Character death will most definitely be threatened, and I'd rather not say what comes of it (though if you're terribly worried, ask me privately).
Disclaimer: They're not mine, and I'm not making any money.

NB: All previous installments of this story were posted in LiveJournal only. I'll be cross-posting from here on in, but not going back and posting old chapters to IJ.

( Chapter 13 )

I created this IJ back during Strikethrough, when I was unhappy with LiveJournal's actions. Then I was pretty much offline for over a year, what with having a baby. A couple of weeks ago when I decided to start getting more active in fandom again, I observed that my IJ flist was a proper subset of my LJ one, so I didn't bother posting here. But now LJ is making wild cutbacks, and there's a thin edge of panic in the air, so what the heck, I'll get with the cross-posting. (Which is to say: I will now be posting the same entries, generally, to both LJ and IJ.)

So I'll start by posting A Buffyverse Alphabet, which went live in my LJ a couple of days ago!

(in the style of Edward Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies)

A is for Anya, who died being brave.
B is for Buffy, crawled out of her grave.
( Read more... )

ETA: tarotgal did one for Highlander!

Oh, look, it's nearly 2009. How did that happen?

I have a plan for the new year, and that plan is: I'm going to participate in fandom, a little! Read my flist once in a while, browse some communities, read a bit of fic, post every once in a while, and, hey, write! I'm working on the next chapter of "That Good Night" now, and I think I'm well on my way to meeting my stated goal of posting chapter thirteen less than a year after chapter twelve. Yay!

See you around!

It's mostly radio silence out of me these days, isn't it? Sorry about that.

As you might recall, my writing output and fandom participation dropped precipitously when I had a baby in October 2007. And look, now it's October 2008! Wow, how time flies.

I'm back at work now, and I'm taking on overtime hours for extra income to support my family, since my husband's now staying home full-time with the baby. This arrangement is awesome in several ways, including 1) I love my job, 2) husband and baby are having a great time together, and 3) I don't have to do any housework at all, ever!

Time for writing is still very limited, sadly. I'm writing every chance I get, which is amounting to about a couple of hours every other weekend.

I must sheepishly admit that "That Good Night" is once again on hold, since I signed up for "Fall for S/X" again (what was I thinking??). My date is December 1st. I will have a real story to post this year, I swear! And so the next chapter of "That Good Night" should go online sometime in, er, January 2009.

In other news, I'm excited at the idea of Writercon 2009, but also very uncertain because I won't know until the spring what my work schedule will be like in the summer.

Know what I've discovered? Post-BtVS, I have no interest in other vampires. I don't want to watch movies about vampires or read books about vampires that aren't the Buffyverse vampires. I just feel like other vampires would be wrong somehow.

I know there were vampires before the Buffyverse. Heck, I read Dracula, years ago. I saw the movie, too. I enjoyed Interview with the Vampire when I was 17 (though I've never read anything else by Anne Rice). But now that I've spent so much time immersed in the world of Spike, Angel, Dru et al, I feel like any vampire that wouldn't poof into dust when staked through the heart would just be, well, unnatural. I would get weirded out if they didn't follow Joss's rules regarding crosses, holy water and sunlight. And the souled/not souled dichotomy is so important!

Does anyone else feel like this? Or am I just weird?

Hello world! How are you? Me, I'm feeling a queasy sort of cross of writer's block and performance anxiety. This is my first post (here) in ten months! I had a baby, you see. Babies are a lot of work, it turns out!

But now I'm starting to get my life back, and I miss fandom. I miss talking about shows and story arcs and characters, and making up stories, and enjoying the pretty. I want to start participating in fandom again. And, for various reasons, I'd like to try using IJ for my fannish journal this time around. Only problem is, I don't know if anyone else is even reading this thing! (yourlibrarian? Are you out there, at least?)

So, hey, without further ado, I guess I'll talk about some shows!

( How is Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog like Batman: The Dark Knight? )

( And how is Battlestar Galactica different? )

I've just posted a Wesley/Lindsey fic at maleslashminis on LJ:

Those Lost at Sea and Never Found

It's not a long fic, but I found it challenging to write; I've never written to a request before, ever, and I'd never written Wesley or Lindsey before, either! In fact, I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to volunteer to write this story—perhaps momentary insanity? Anyway, it's done, just barely in time to prevent the long-suffering and very sweet community maintainers from giving up on me and looking for a backup backup writer. (This was a backup fic in the first place.)

So that is part of the explanation of why I still haven't updated That Good Night—the other part of the explanation is that I'm now over 8 months pregnant, and have been teaching full-time since mid-August, so spare time has been sparse (and mostly dedicated to sleep!).

But hey, my maternity leave starts in a week, and first babies arrive late more often than not, so theoretically I could have three weeks or so with nothing to do but lounge (er, waddle) around the house and write fanfiction! ... We shall see.

Crossposted: LJ, IJ, JF, GJ

So, er, hi out there! Seems I've dropped off the fannish radar. Again. I'm bad like that.

I haven't been writing or reading—lately I've been pretty busy with the working, and being very pregnant, and sleeping a lot. Sorry!

I am still trying to finish a very short piece I promised as a replacement fic for maleslash minis, and then it's back to That Good Night. But hey, I've been saying that for a while, so you can believe it when you see it.

Anyway, I'm really just popping by to tell you about the nightmare I had the night before last. Because hey, what's more interesting that listening to other people's dreams? *blink* *blink* But seriously, it had to do with fanfic...

In the dream, some sort of apocalypse had just arrived. Not a Buffy-style apocalypse, but a more mundane total breakdown of society, I think—my dream was not really specific on how or why it had happened. The point is, I was at home and it was getting dark and I tried to turn on the lights, and found that the power was out, and I knew that that meant the power was out for good—the power company was no longer functioning, civilization had fallen apart, etc.

And what was the first thing I thought of? Ice cream. I thought, "Damn it, that means I'll never get to have ice cream again in my life!" And that made me sad.

And what was the second thing I thought of? Fanfic. I thought, "Oh no, there's no computer access, there's no internet—I'll never be able to read fanfic again!" And that made me very sad. I started trying to remember fanfic that I'd already read, and I really wished I'd made hard copies back when I had the chance, before civilization crumbled. I wracked my brain for ways to get in touch with other authors: perhaps by letters? (I don't know why I thought the postal service would outlast the electric grid. But hey, that's what The Postman was about, right?) But no, letters were impossible, because I didn't know anyone's addresses. Woe!

So apparently, this is what my subconscious mind values most about civilization: ice cream and fanfiction.

Crossposted: IJ, LJ, GJ, JF

Okay, I've seen these linked all over my flist, so it's likely you've all seen them linked too, but in the spirit of trying to get a steadier output of fannish glee going here, I bring you: links to three vids I've just watched and enjoyed!

sockkpuppett (luminosity) has done a 300 (the movie) vid: Vogue. It is so very, very pretty. I haven't seen the movie, but this vid makes me want to. Oh, and I called my husband over to watch (which is not something I regularly do with fanvids!)—and he liked it too.

dualbunny's vid Tragedy (starring Spike) is, oh, shiny and impressive and angstily hilarious.

stormwreath also made a Spike-centric vid: Boy from the Mouth of Hell. This one's more serious; he describes it as a character study, and he's got detailed notes to accompany the vid. I found it interesting, and fun to watch.

I don't know much about the making of vids (though I did manage to make about 20 seconds of a Veronica Mars vid with the help of my 14-year-old cousin while we were touring Alaska—we didn't have time to finish it, sadly, but at least it did start to give me an appreciation of the work that goes into a vid!) I find them really fascinating, the way they take a pre-existing song and pre-existing clips and use them to make something entirely new. I love it when they make me think about a character (or a song!) in some entirely new way. Also, a lot of them are really fun and pretty!

Crossposted to InsaneJournal, LiveJournal, GreatestJournal and JournalFen