monkeys and ponies

Year-end fic meme

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 21:30:34 GMT

( the year in fic, after the cut )

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Year-end fic meme

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 20:59:35 GMT

( the year in fic, after the cut )

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Year-end fic meme

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 20:45:46 GMT

( the paltry year in fic, after the cut )

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Year-end fic meme

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 01:50:59 GMT

Normally, I'd post this on New Year's Eve, but I'll be out much of tomorrow at Star Wars (again) and a lovely dinner, so you get it tonight instead.

( after the cut )

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Books read, 2015

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 00:12:59 GMT

Man, tracking what I read on Goodreads sure has made this post easier to compile. (In fact, if you follow me there, you've read all these reviews already.) I made a concerted effort this year to read more books by women and/or non-white folks, and I'm glad I did, because I got points of view and writing styles I might not otherwise encounter. I plan to continue this approach next year.

( 25 reviews, after the cut )

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AO3 meme

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 15:54:24 GMT

Why the hell not, I've got some time today, and this has started going around the flist:

I currently have 56 works archived at the AO3. Pick a number from 1 (the most recent) to 56 (the first thing I posted there), and I'll tell you three things I currently like about it.

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Fic meme

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 23:26:34 GMT

Since it's been a little while since I last posted, why not have a meme I'm also participating in on Tumblr? I've got time tonight, what the hell. (Tomorrow, of course, it's back to the teaching/wireframing mines.)

Ask me questions about writing.

1. Which is your favorite of the fics you've written for X fandom?
2. Favorite piece overall?
3. Which was the hardest to write, in terms of plot?
4. Which has the most "you" in it, however you'd define that?
5. What is an image/set of images that you're particularly proud of?
6. Idea that you always wanted to write but could never make work?
7. Least favorite plot point/chapter/moment?
8. Favorite plot point/chapter/moment?
9. Favorite character to write?
10. Favorite line or lines of dialogue that you've written
11. If I'm showing off just one of your pieces to someone, which one should it be?
12. What WIPs do you have going now? Are you excited about them?
13. Are there any things that might have happened in any of your stories, but you changed them at the last minute? (So-and-so dies, they don't actually kiss, main character has long extended ballet-based dream sequence, etc.)
14. Would you want to write canon for any of your fandoms (like be hired by showrunner to do an episode)? Which one?
15. Does font matter to you when you're writing a draft?
16. 3 favorite comments ever received on fanfic.
17. Any mean comments? How'd you deal with it? Who laid the smackdown?
18. If you could go back and revise one of your older stories, which would it be?
19. Do you make up scenes at work/on the bus/at the gym? Who are the characters that pop up the most? Do you write them down?
20. Go nuts, and talk about writing.

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Year-end Fic Meme

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 22:25:06 GMT

Fic written in 2014
The Transitive Property (Twelve/ghost!River/Clara, adult)
Ancient History (Ian/Barbara/Martha, adult)
Hide and Seek (Ten/River, Donna; teen; co-authored with nostalgia)
On the Banks of the Sararahelkos (Eleven/River, all ages)
Fairy Tales (Twelve/Clara, adult)
Old-Fashioned Love (Twelve/Missy, adult)
Riddles in the Dark (Two/Jamie, the Great Intelligence; all ages)

... plus two f'locked stories that will never see the light of day for various reasons.

( rest of the meme, after the cut )

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Writing meme

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 01:38:55 GMT

Stolen from elsewhere on the flist:

Put a number in the comments and I’ll answer accordingly. The mission for those of us who answer the questions, should we accept it, is to stay positive about our writing and ourselves, but to also be fair about our shortcomings.

1. Of the fic you’ve written, of which are you most proud?
2. Favorite tense
3. Favorite POV
4. What are some themes you love writing about?
5. What inspires you to write?
6. Thoughts on critique
7. Create a character on the spot... NOW!
8. Is there a character you love writing for the most? The least? Why?
9. A passage from a WIP
10. What are your strengths in writing?
11. What are your weaknesses in writing?
12. Anything else that you want to know... (otherwise known as Fill in the Blank)

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Year-end Fic Meme

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 16:47:03 GMT

( It's that time again! )

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AO3 meme

Thu, 23 May 2013 01:43:20 GMT

Stolen from elsewhere on the flist:

I currently have 40 works archived at AO3. Pick a number from 1 (the most recent) to 40 (the first thing I posted there), and I'll tell you three things I currently like about it.

Note that #5 is a collection of 48 separate stories, so if you pick that one, you might want to supply a second number to tell me which story you want to hear about.

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Fic questions meme

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 23:07:20 GMT

Meme stolen from elsewhere on the flist:

Give me a number and I'll answer the question.

1. Which is your favorite of the fics you’ve written for [name of fandom]?
2. Favorite piece overall?
3. Which was the hardest to write, in terms of plot?
4. Which has the most “you” in it, however you’d define that?
5. What is an image/set of images that you’re particularly proud of?
6. Idea that you always wanted to write but could never make work?
7. Least favorite plot point/chapter/moment?
8. Favorite plot point/chapter/moment?
9. Favorite character to write?
10. Favorite line or lines of dialogue that you’ve written
11. If I’m showing off just one of your pieces to someone, which one should it be?
12. What WIPs do you have going now? Are you excited about them?
13. Are there any things that might have happened in any of your stories, but you changed them at the last minute? (So-and-so dies, they don’t actually kiss, main character has long extended ballet-based dream sequence, etc.)
14. Would you want to write canon for any of your fandoms (like be hired by showrunner to do an episode)? Which one?
15. Does font matter to you when you’re writing a draft?
16. 3 favorite comments ever received on fanfic.
17. Any mean comments? How’d you deal with it? Who laid the smackdown?
18. If you could go back and revise one of your older stories, which would it be?
19. Do you make up scenes at work/on the bus/at the gym? Who are the characters that pop up the most? Do you write them down?
20. Go nuts, and talk about writing. Or write me a little ficlet-whatsit using a character/image/line I shall now specify—

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Year-end Fic Meme

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:25:31 GMT

Man, another year already? ( fic meme, after the cut )

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End of year fandom meme

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 21:34:11 GMT

Picking this one up from lizbee. ( after the cut )

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Fic I'd never write: Pete's World babyfic

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 22:13:03 GMT

karenor might have had a hard time coming up with something I wouldn't write, but she sure as heck figured it out eventually: Pete's World babyfic. Babyfic is one of my least favorite genres (tied with Caveman!Nine), and the one time I wrote it, it was pure crack, because hell if I could have written serious babyfic.

So this is about as close as I can get: a half-serious/half-comic snippet of babyfic I'd never normally write. ( Handy/Rose, obviously, plus Jackie, after the cut )

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AO3 hit count meme

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 01:32:28 GMT

Since everyone else is doing it: ( after the cut )

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Fic commentary meme

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:08:48 GMT

I've been meaning to pick this one up again for a while, and hey, it's a quiet weekend for a change!

Request any fic of mine and I will provide you with a commentary/annotations, like a DVD extra.

Roughly complete list of fic available at the "fic" tag on LJ or Dreamwidth, or on my Teaspoon page. Kinkmeme stories are fair game, too.

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Year-end fic meme

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:58:11 GMT

I've done this for the past couple years, so why not do it again? ( fic meme responses, after the cut )

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30 Days of Fanfic meme: ratings

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 01:53:29 GMT

Day 14 - Ratings – how high are you comfortable with going? Have you ever written higher? If you're comfortable with NC-17, have you ever been shocked by finding that the story you're writing is G-rated instead?

I find this question unexpectedly hilarious, since the very first piece of fanfic I wrote was explicit, mildly kinky porn, and porn consists of at least fifty percent of my total fic output. So, "how high am I comfortable with going"? How high do the ratings go?

Mind you, I didn't start writing fanfic with the intent of writing so much porn. I just wrote the characters and stories that interested me, and if those stories happened to include sex, fine. The ridiculous number of kinkmeme stories I've written is as much due to my interest in problem-solving as my interest in writing pairings I like -- for example, how could I make a pairing like Miss Evangelista/Luke Rattigan work in a way I found believable? Writing a sex scene is easy compared to that.

Because sex isn't always the reason I write a story, I have definitely found myself writing something I expected to include a lot of porn and then been surprised when the final product had virtually nothing at all. In fact, this happened in my most recent story, Conversations With the Flesh, which initially began as an excuse to write Eleven/Flesh!Eleven; but the more I focused on Cleaves, the less the Eleven pairing became important to me, to the point that now it's a couple of non-explicit lines in an otherwise entirely gen fic. If I want to go back to Eleven/Flesh!Eleven later to ... uh, flesh things out, there's nothing stopping me, but it wasn't the right choice for that story. Lord knows if someone wants more porn from me anyway, they've got plenty to choose from.

( complete list of days )

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30 Days of Fanfic meme: canon vs. fanon

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 23:18:44 GMT

Day 13 - Do you prefer canon or fanon when you write? Has writing fanfic for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?

I go to an occasionally tremendous amount of trouble to slot my stories into canon and get a little annoyed with myself when I can't make that work. I consider Jossing of some of my stories inevitable, but I always try to start with something canon-compliant and hope canon continues to allow my story to stay that way for as long as possible.

In general, writing fic hasn't changed the way I see the source material other than what I discussed back in Day 7. It's much more frequently the opposite, where I use fic to fix a problem I have with the source material (e.g., the way the sexuality of older women like Jackie and Donna was mocked), but I think that's pretty common among fic authors.

( complete list of days )

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30 Days of Fanfic meme: "adaptation" fics

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 23:09:17 GMT

Day 12 - Have you ever attempted an "adaptation" fic of a favorite book or movie but set in a different fandom?

Not deliberately, although The Less Than Perfect Daughter was loosely inspired by the classic Christmas Carol/It's a Wonderful Life plot of showing someone how badly their life will turn out if they don't fix something. Since I'm not generally a fan of "adaptation" fics, this is as close as I'm likely to get.

( complete list of days )

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30 Days of Fanfic meme: fic genres

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 01:13:31 GMT

Day 11 - Genre – do you prefer certain genres of fic when you're writing? What kind do you tend to write most?

Definitely, and unsurprisingly, these are the same genres of fic I prefer to read: angst, comedy/crack, porn, and combinations of the above. I once joked that my fic followed a predictable pattern:

angst

talking

angst

more talking

still more talking

angst resolution

the end.

... and honestly, if I'm not careful when I'm writing, it still follows that pattern. (As does at least some of my comedy/crack.)

It's very rare for me to write anything in the fluff genre, and I don't think I've ever written H/C. But I do have three pieces of straight-up gen (more if you count some of the Martha drabbles), and that's the one genre I write that I don't often read. In fact, I'd probably write more gen if I were any good at all with coming up with plots, but I am terrible at it. In the time it would take me to come up with a plot worthy of sustaining at least 5,000 words, I could write you that much relatively plotless porn -- and now you know why it's 50% of my output.

( complete list of days )

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30 Days of Fanfic meme: pairings outside your comfort zone

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:35:25 GMT

Day 10 - Pairings – Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't write, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?

I can't think of any pairings I've liked but couldn't write (yet), but I've found pairings I don't like and wrote anyway, simply because they captured my attention even if I wouldn't normally go out of my way to read or write them.

The most obvious example is my Six/Donna story, The Right Doctor, written for a kinkmeme prompt. Six is my least favorite Doctor, and I don't find Colin Baker sexy at all. (Not even 70's Porn Colin. Sorry.) But the idea of blowhard Six meeting equally blowhard Donna struck me as hilarious, so I wrote it anyway. To this day I don't fully understand the appeal of this story, but the people who like it really like it, so I'm not going to complain.

The only other pairing I've written that doesn't appeal to me is Nine/Jenny -- incest squicks the hell out of me -- but it was a very brief segment written purely as a joke in a longer, Jenny-centric kinkmeme story. It's a very wrong joke, but it's a joke nevertheless, which is the only reason I was able to write it at all.

( complete list of days )

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30 Days of Fanfic meme: favorite pairings to write

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:03:04 GMT

Day 9 - Pairings – For each of the fandoms from day two, what are your three favorite pairings to write?

This question assumes you're the kind of author who sticks to a comparatively small number of pairings, and to be fair, that's probably the case for most authors.

In my case, though, I've written 71 different pairings. I get bored easily, and I like the challenge of writing characters and pairings I haven't written before (and in some cases, as far as I can tell, no one has written before).

But if forced to choose from that list, I'll probably go with combinations of Doctor/River, Doctor/Romana, and Doctor/Rose. In general, I prefer to write the New Who Doctors, simply because I've seen those episodes more recently than the Classic series ones, and Nine, Ten, and Eleven's voices are fresher in my head.

Anyway, if you're curious, the complete list of pairings follows. Nearly all of the stories with these pairings are public, and I may yet publicly post the few that aren't. ( Even I was surprised by how long this list was. )

( complete list of days )

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30 Days of Fanfic meme: writing OCs

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 21:58:50 GMT

Day 8 - Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.

I don't write OCs very often simply because OCs aren't the reason I want to write fic. They're occasionally useful, but I'd rather explore the canon characters and leave the OCs for original fiction, not fic. Similarly, I don't read OCs very often because they're not why I want to read fic, but there are authors I trust to do them well, and who I know won't be writing a self-insert with changeable eye colors who's actually the love child of Theta and Koschei raised by the Dursleys and who secretly grew wings and acquired psychic powers at age thirteen.

I don't think it's all that hard to avoid writing a Mary Sue -- don't give your character wild powers unless the story absolutely demands it; don't make them closely related to one of the main canon characters; and above all, remember your character, like virtually everyone else, is going to have flaws. What's hard is avoiding people calling your character a Mary Sue even when she isn't, or simply assuming that an OC = Mary Sue and never reading your story in the first place. And those problems seem inevitable, at least in the fanfic community.

Anyway, the OC I paid the most attention to is Sarah, the young grocery store clerk in Clean-Up on Aisle Three ... . (I have OCs in some other stories, but they're generally in and out of the narrative so quickly I don't need to do much characterization.) Sarah worked because she was a normal person with a normal job, normal problems, and a willingness to help the Doctor, but not the kind of inner strength that would allow her to travel with him. I could have written that story with a Mary Sue, but that would have been much less interesting to me. My only regret about her is that I wish I'd had an extra 250-500 words to flesh her out a tiny bit more, but alas, Big Finish's word count limitations were pretty strict.

( complete list of days )

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