neveralarch

Happy New Year and happy Yuletide reveals! I only wrote five fics this year, but it was nice to do a much more scaled-back version of my Yuletide tradition.

For Yuletide this year I was gifted this amazing fic:

In our house full of violets and sun (1527 words) by caughtinanocean
Fandom: The Half of It (2020)
Rating: General Audiences
Relationships: Ellie Chu/Original Character(s), Aster Flores/Original Character(s), Ellie Chu/Aster Flores
Summary: Sometimes, falling for someone is about learning who you are – not about ending up together.

This is such a lovely thing! After watching this movie I really really wanted a fic about their lives after high school where they DON'T get together, where they learn and grow and become complete people and look back on each other with fondness but not necessarily regret. IDK, man, but I'm glad caughtinanocean was like 'ok I got you' haha. Several of the comments are along the lines of 'this is the first fic I've read that isn't endgame Ellie/Aster but it's so good.' The heart wants what it wants!!

My main fic is:

Lost Thoughts (2479 words) for janie_tangerine
Fandom: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Rating: General Audiences
Characters: Horst Cabal, Johannes Cabal
Summary: Johannes Cabal woke up on the stone floor of a bare room. It smelled of dirt and mildew, with a faint undertone of something that Johannes easily identified as blood. There was a little light filtering dimly through a slit in the door—just enough to see that the room was indeed as bare as bare could be. Except, of course, for the man lying on the floor next to him.

 

Johannes kicked him.

Janie_tangerine wanted Cabal brothers fic and I looked at my giant pile of Cabal brothers fic I'd already written and panicked a little because I couldn't think what else to do. But! Eventually I came up with this. It was so easy to write once I got started (banter!!), and fascination_ex very kindly poked at me when I needed to work on it and betaed it for me once it was done :)

I also wrote four treats:

The Best Defense (1271 words) for kouredios
Fandom: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense (McSweeney's Post) - Luke Burns
Rating: General Audiences
Summary:
You had to fight a big snake for your thesis defense. One of the largest ones you'd ever seen—and you'd attended plenty of defenses, seen the fear in the doctoral candidates' eyes as they sought out their snake in the shadows. You don't actually know if it's the biggest snake the facilities department had to offer, because they don't like to give out that much information. But it was a very big snake indeed.

First off, if you've never read this McSweeney's article, please do, it's amazing. Second, uhhhh I might have some. Thoughts about grad school and academia. My experience has mostly been positive! I feel very lucky with where I ended up. But man, is it a perilous road and I've seen so many people fall down hidden pits through no fault of their own. Kouredios had a particularly difficult time and wanted a snake to eat their abusive advisor, so I needed to oblige.

Face-up (1192 words) for DesdemonaKaylose
Fandom: 月刊少女野崎くん | Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun
Rating: General Audiences
Characters: Hori Masayuki, Kashima Yuu (Gekkan)
Summary: "Hey, Kashima," Hori said, staring intently into his tea, "do you have makeup?"

I wrote a little thing for Dez! This one is about gender nonconformity in an anime she suggested to me earlier this year. Dez actually got a much longer response to the same prompt by an amazing veteran Hori/Kashima writer, hooray for Yuletide! It was so fun to write this, but it was also very fun to be like 'hehehehe.... I did a nice thing for Dez.... LITTLE DOES SHE KNOW....'

(She says she knew.)

Monitor Lizard (1906 words) for Rosencrantz
Fandom: Transformers: Beast Wars
Rating: Mature
Relationships: Dinobot/Rattrap (Transformers)
Summary: It's a long, boring shift on monitor duty. Fortunately, Rattrap's got some ideas for how to liven it up.

We watched all of Beast Wars in the discord chat this year and oh MAN is it good. It's so good, and this is such a good ship. That's really all I can say, haha.

Energon on Your Lips (1236 words) for rayguntomyhead
Fandom: Transformers: Shattered Glass
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Jazz/Prowl (Transformers)
Summary: Jazz was already good at killing before he met Prowl. That was the joke about Autobots, wasn't it? Hang around with them too long and your head might just come off.

raygun is a v rad person and I was delighted to write some Jazz/Prowl for them - and then even more delighted bc they left a series of amazing comments on my ongoing Prowl wip!! Another 'hehehe I have a dastardly plot to be nice' moment :) Jabberish also sent this fic to me like 'I think you would like this but I also think you wrote it' haha. I wanted to take SG a little more seriously, and spin Prowl a bit on his conscience - here he likes sharing information and doesn't like killing people, which implies that 'normal' Prowl is actually the evil one.

And that's all of em! Here's to 2021, hope it gets better from here.

HELLO I WOULD LIKE EVERYONE TO KNOW THAT I WAS CATCHING UP ON B99 AND THEY REVEALED THE VILLAIN IN EPISODE 3 AND I NEARLY FELL OUT OF MY CHAIR

I'M GETTING CHILLS AND I FLAPPED MY HANDS SO HARD THAT I KNOCKED A BUNCH OF SHIT OVER

LOVE IS REAL
( extremely minor casting spoilers )

Aren't you all glad that I'm back on the internet so I can share these things with you?

Update, June 2013: Dudes, I am super lazy about updating this, and AO3 is way more navigable than this mess of a list. If you want to find fic on my journal, the tagging system should have your back (or leave a comment and I will help you find the fic!).

Since fanfiction and fanart are basically the only things I post, here's a list. I realize you could just go through my tags, but I hate doing that on other people's journals, so why should I make anyone else?

( List, list, list. )

I have finished a thing! Finally. I started writing this in July. This fulfills the predicament bondage and inexperienced dom squares on my idfic bingo!

Slip
Elementary
Rating: teen
(swearing, BDSM (emphasis on bondage/rope kink, but also d/s). Let me know if you need details.)
Characters: Gregson/Holmes, Bell, Watson.
Wordcount: 4,700ish
Summary: "You're not doing the knot right," says Holmes. Gregson closes his eyes and prays for strength.
A/N: Just so you know, this is firmly in the AU of 'everyone likes each other and nothing stands in the way of my guilty-pleasure ship.' Sometimes you just feel a need to write this stuff.

( fic under the cut )

First thing: I have been trying to do a personal tumblr again. I'm not sure if I'll stick with it, but I do enjoy looking at pictures. If we haven't connected on there yet, let me know your tumblr (mine is just neveralarch).

Second thing: I have been consuming media this summer! It's nice.

Still watching FMA! It is good, and keeps subverting my expectations, because I know how the story goes and IT'S NOT GOING THERE. Reserving final judgment until I finish the series - I'm at like episode 41 right now.

Next - I saw The Lion in Winter with my mom and brother, and OH MY GOD

( lion in winter reaction )

Finally! I have blown through books two and three of the Matthew Swift series. I think there are a couple people on my flist who are fans? I can't remember.

( matthew swift reactions! )

So, yes. I am enjoying consuming all of this media.

Let me mention my giftfic again real quick first: A Pain in My SideKICK (The Non-Adventures of Wonderella) and Nonstarter (By the Sword), both by leidolette who is apparently a stellar human being. They're awesome.

Here is what I wrote:

Some Time Before (7080 words), for anstaar
Discworld, Teen. Sybil Ramkin/Samuel Vimes, Adora Belle Dearheart/Moist von Lipwig
Summary: The thing about being young is that it happens to most everyone.

My assigned fic! I was deeply uncertain about this as I was writing it, but people liked it and I think it must have turned pretty well after all. And it has four of my favorite Discworld characters in it, so.

And then I wrote ten treats while not writing a term paper:

( these are cut to save your scrolling )

The end! Tomorrow I start replying to comments, and then I will finally stop talking about Yuletide for at least nine months.

Three day weekends are the bane of my existence. The extra Monday is never very good out at the ren faire, and then I'm totally useless on Tuesday. I managed to briefly get out of the house this afternoon, but I've since mostly just messed around and watched the US-Canada wheelchair basketball game (which was rad as hell, and then we won :D). By the way, who's excited for paralympics streaming? Me. I am the most excited. I missed wheelchair fencing today, and will def miss it tomorrow, because I have class, but I find all of the sports in the paralympics to be AWESOME to watch, so it is okay. I saw part of one of the seated volleyball matches too, and it was great.

Haven't watched the new Doctor Who episode, and I'm feeling kind of ambivalent about tracking it down. Maybe I'll watch it tomorrow, as an after-class thing, I'm just not awake enough today. I have been watching The Wire, though, as part of my campaign to avoid current television. And man, The Wire is good television - a police/crime show with a really tight grasp on Baltimore as both a setting and a kind of character. Just finished season one, and seriously considering starting season two tonight, even though I have a bunch of other stuff that needs done. I'll probably end up writing a ridiculous Teen Wolf crossover, even though The Wire deserves better - one of the actors was in both shows, and Doctor Who crossovers have taught me that this makes a crossover/fusion fair game.

I've gone from having an aversion to Teen Wolf fic to having a list of fics I'm not writing. Like, I'm not writing the AU where they work at a ren faire, because I ALWAYS want to write that AU for whatever fandom I'm into when I've been working for a while. It's too close to home (like, literally), and I am worried that people won't get it/will get it/idk, I am worried. Even though Derek as a life-long rennie who works at a leather place and Stiles as a playtron with his own armor and sword would be hilarious, nope, not writing this, not least because I can't even talk about it without slipping into rennie slang. It would be a mess.

The list of fics I am writing currently stands at: involved AU that isn't going anywhere and is mostly an excuse for extended Peter, Laura and Derek interactions; and comedy Derek-in-heat fic. I basically knew that I would be working on the AU as soon as I started listening to Sail on repeat and having feelings about Peter Hale (courtesy of this fanmix). The Derek-in-heat thing woke me up on Sunday night (when I had work in the morning) to scribble out half a page. Thanks, brain.

But! There is also a list of things I have written! I hung out on the spice up your life Teen Wolf rare pairs ficathon some, because I love doing prompts. I only ended up writing gen fic, though I do still have my eye on a couple pairing prompts. So:

Breathe
Teen Wolf
Rating: gen
(major character injury)
Characters: Peter Hale, Derek Hale, Erica Reyes, Boyd, Isaac Lahey
Wordcount: 1300 words
Summary: Derek gets seriously injured, but his pack and the last of his family are there to take care of him.

And Look at Them
Teen Wolf
Rating: gen
(brief references to canon character illness and character death)
Characters: Derek Hale, Boyd, Isaac Lahey, Erica Reyes
Wordcount: 1200ish words
Summary: The Pack's feelings on Derek's apparent leather jacket requirement.

That's it at the moment. I'm going to make soup and try not to worry about my two classes tomorrow - I have to go be a real grad student, agh. Not sure how to do that when my head is still full of Teen Wolf, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Let me talk about my Carnivale giftfic again, first: From the Dirt by arllama was really great, and I love it and the author forever because I got a story for meeee. (I'm like this during every story exchange, but especially Yuletide. A story for meeeee.)

And Reveals! I wrote eleven fics again, just like last year - it may possibly become a tradition, though it's probably best that I don't try to commit to it. I was much more delayed on my main fic this time, and then I ended up writing a second fic for my assigned person and a bunch of random treats on the 20th, which was better than last year (when I wrote treats on the 24th). Basically my only resolution last year was to start writing treats earlier, so that worked out, haha.

Short headers and some commentary:

( ...under the cut )

In summary, Yuletide was a blast and now I have to go respond to comments. And start stockpiling obscure fandoms for next year.

I'm flying to Florence tomorrow, so I might be out of contact for a few days. Hopefully I'll be having fun with a place to stay, although the people who have offered me a spot in their backyard are being a bit off-and-on with the giving me information thing. Anyway, after that I'm flying to the US next Saturday. I'm just going to apologize now for long delays in responding to anything.

But before I go! sophia_sol  was doing this meme where you answer five questions, and then you give other people five questions. These are my answers - if anyone wants some questions for themselves, just ask (although, as noted above, you might have to wait a while for the questions).

( This is cut for babble and a tiny bit of swearing. Possibly an abuse trigger? Only discussed in a fictional and vague context. )

Made it back from London a good six days ago, for those of you keeping track at home. It was definitely awesome. I went to 12 museums in 6 days, walked around so much I broke one of my boots, tried really hard to buy new boots and got the Thick of It book instead, and met a ton of people. Including aralias (on purpose) and x_los  (in a random coincidence), who were both really nice and somehow willing to put up with my weird and slightly exhausted self.

I was so weird on that London trip, I don't even know. I'm pretty sure I was high on museums or something. (I am still ALL ABOUT the museums in London - I will spare you my 530 photos of the British Museum, but I haven't decided whether I'll spare you the essay on the erasure of procurement that every museum ever has done. It's sad when there's more visible documentation from your average sideshow than from your average museum.)

In actual fandom news, I did finally manage to listen to Gallifrey Series 4. It was... good? ( cut in case you care and are still avoiding spoilers ) Here's hoping Series Five doesn't take as long.

Non-Gallifrey related, I finished the first draft of my remix, so now I have to actually go back and make it good. Right now it's kind of a mash of two different themes and as many random references as I could cram in, so not much on the sense-making front. But I have a first draft, which is a huge relief. I think I might miss DS9 rewatch tomorrow, which is SAD but not sad enough to make me stay up until four in the morning or whatever to watch with the other group. And I started engulfing White Collar a few days ago and have now seen all but the last episode of the first season - it's a really good thing that most of my classes haven't started yet, there's no way I could do that otherwise.

Okay, I'm going to go buy groceries or do reading for class or something useful. How are other people's lives doing?