First off, I am back from Iceland! Iceland is amazing. We circumnavigated the entire island, stopped manymany places, have hundreds of pictures to go through, about fifty sketches, several small bags of lava rocks, and twelve new books on my to-read list. Also I am no longer used to a) the temperature being too hot? b) mosquitos? and c) it getting dark outside at night, what is that about.

Anyway there is no way I will ever write up a proper post about the trip (perhaps I will scan the sketchbook at some point) so for now, if you want to hear about Iceland, give me a letter from A-þ and I will tell you something about Iceland.

Also! I wrote a remix fic! Which revealed while I was away so probably most everyone who cares has seen it already, but here it is anyway:

Embrace the World in Gray (The La Cosetta Nostra remix) (6363 words) by melannen based on Cards and Flowers on Your Window by geckoholic
Fandom: Pacific Rim (2013)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Alison Choi, Stacker Pentecost, Mako Mori, Hermann Gottlieb, Kaidonovsky, Hannibal Chau, Tendo Choi
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Black Markets, Remix, Dad Sweaters
Summary: Alison may run a thingy mafia, but she's not sure where the Marshall got the idea that it qualified her to negotiate with a mafia mafia.

Remix was also super-fun! I ended up writing one of the top ten longest fics in the collection which is just ??? when did that start happening. But it was great! Have you ever had the experience where you read a really good fic but your response to it was "That was great, but it should have been this other completely different story instead because I want that one more"? And there's no real polite way to express those feelings. Except in Remix! And one of my remixee's fics gave me exactly that response - she wrote a post-movie fic about how Tendo Choi's not-appearing-in-this-movie wife Alison was running a gray-market behind-the-scenes "thingy mafia". And I loved geckoholic's Alison and the role she gave her and the networks she showed among the Shatterdome staff, but what I really wanted - what I'd been wanting, actually, since I'd seen the movie - was something set during the period when the PPDC was transforming from the unlimited-budget, media-darling saviors of the world into the scrappy, scrouning, Chau-funded resistance. I'd never even tried to write it because the whole concept seemed so huge that I had no idea where to start or how to get out of it if I did, but borrowing geckoholic's perfect Alison gave me exactly the right viewpoint to show a little of that transition from a very insightful POV. So anyway. That was fun! Yay remix.