monkeys and ponies

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 )

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.

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)

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.

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

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 )

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.

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 )