So I have closed down my booktracking for 2014. Once I added in my Yuletide canon at the last minute (which I will definitely post about sooner or later), I had 181 books read for the year, and total of 200 books in my Goodreads account. (I probably missed one or two ebooks or picture books in there, especially before I started with Goodreads, but it's pretty close.) You can see the whole horrifying list on my librarything account.

181 sounds like a lot, but bear in mind that 67 of them were comics, and another 30 were picture books or easy readers, not to mention all the glossy artbooks, piano books, pamphlety things, and field guides. In fact if you add up just proper books with more words than pictures, it's more like 70.

(Although even with the picture books and comics I'm averaging about 170 pages per book which isn't too shabby.)

To nobody's surprise once I'd put it in a spreadsheet to get that info I did a bunch more stats. :P ( A Bunch More Stats )

My first reading goal for 2014 is to finish all 26 of the books currently in my current-reading. ^_^ And then keep the current-reading below 20 for the rest of the year.

Other reading goals:
1. Hit my 200-total-books-read challenge on Goodreads
2. Of which at least 100 are books I owned before 2015
3. And at least 24 are novels (or book-length story collections)
4. Not included in 200 total: read one current short story magazine every month, and read through my longbox of floppies
5. Review at least half of them
6. Own fewer unread books at end of year than beginning (current tally: 1997. 245 of them added in the past twelve months. *sigh*)

That should be totally doable, right? *gnaws fingernail*

( As for the rest of my goals for the year.. )

Several of those require sustained amounts of adulting, which is gonna be hard, so I guess we'll see what happens!

1. I have been doing a terrible job with the writing lately. Since last update, I have written a few hundred more words of the ANitLO crossover, some more Montparnasse fic, some more Booby!Marius story, and a tiny tiny bit of the one where Cap and Tony are both fail at coming out.

2. Part of the reason for this is that I keep coming home at night and not wanting to do anything but SLEEP. So yesterday I read rydra_wong's post on winter light and realized that the fact that f.lux is set to make me sleepy at sunset probably isn't helping. I didn't want to turn it off because I still don't need to be staring bright-eyed at Tumblr until 2 AM, so I decided to try reversing the latitude on my f.lux location - it may be getting dark under the daystar, but my laptop's brightness now thinks I live off the coast of South America and it's late spring with the days still getting longer. We'll see if it helps.

3. Also possibly more relevantly to the lack of writing I read the Loki: Agent of Asgard trade and then read all of the Boyband!Loki fic on AO3. I knew better than to start reading Loki:AoA, because getting mixed up with trickster gods is ALWAYS a bad idea, and besides I've read enough Marvel Now trades to know that it'll inevitably get mixed up in a massive crossover event and start to suck. But you know. As of the first trade it is basically flawless and also 100% made of fandom catnip and I can't. Come talk to me about AoA.

Comics!Loki, for those who don't know, has in the past few years gone through a complicated series of disincorporations/autocides/reiterations, more-or-less intentionally, and is currently in a body that frequently gets him mistaken for Harry Styles and/or Justin Beiber, trying to figure out how to stop being the villain of the story and develop a working conscience, despite everything - from his destiny to his Queens - working against him. If boyband!Loki gleefully out-scheming everybody in the Marvel Universe, swashbuckling with hot dudes, going on crime capers as a hot chick, having vaguely-platonic coffee with a cute hipster girl he met while speed-dating, being blatantly objectified by the narrative, being canonically pansexual and genderfluid, and being tragic yet determined about stuff like the nature of free will and stories and truth and good and evil and guilt and redemption sound like your kind of thing - well, run very fast in the other direction from Agent of Asgard, okay, because Loki is always bad news.

(If you've seen the panels where Loki confesses to having created a most terrible slash on the internet, okay, so, on the one hand yay, on the other hand given all the meta stuff about how Loki is defined by the stories written about him, and his newly canonically fluid gender/sexuality, I really want to talk about why Loki is creating slash on the internet, and what stories he's telling.)

(he's writing about Sigurd fucking him in their trash dumpster.)

4. ( Here are some boyband!Loki fic recs )

You will notice there is no Sigurd in those recs. That is because there is no Sigurd fic on AO3. At all. ...fandom, write me some Loki/Sigurd fic like, yesterday. HOW CAN YOU RESIST THAT FACE

5. I shall put in for the DW friending meme that ladyscribe is running, but it totally expects you to be doing the December posting meme. I have too much stuff going on to commit to posting on certain days, but I will borrow isis's weekly variation. So here is your chance to make me talk about a thing, any thing at all. as long as it's AoA Loki

Give me a topic and pick a week and I will try to talk about that topic on my journal at some point during that week. (disclaimers: topics for a given week are cut off after 5; several topics may be combined into one post.)

Week 1: Dec 1-7 : a book you loved that you didn't expect to and why (the_rck); what are your feelings on Agent of Asgard? (dhampyresa)
Week 2: Dec 8-14 : what would be your ideal next canon YA series? (schneefink); Young Wizards crossovers! Why are they awesome? Can everything be a YW crossover? Discuss. (sineala); Most oddball piece of research done this year - whether it be for work, wrangling, fic or because the brain-weasels attacked ... (aoifes_isle)
Week 3: Dec 15-21 : how the MCU compares to comic universe (chordatesrock); Tell me something (or somethings, if you like) you would like to see more of in the fantasy genre. (alasse_irena); Is there a book/show/movie you've been fully intending to get to this year but find yourself putting off for some reason? (Fear of disappointment, not wanting it to be over--whatever!) (umadoshi)
Week 4: Dec 22-28 : could you talk a bit about Their Majesties' Bucketeers? I reread it not too long ago and I'd love to hear about what kind of fic you wish there was, or some meta if you've got it in you. (fenellaevangela); talk about your writing process (espresso_addict).; perhaps you could talk about The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (redsnake05)

6. If you're curious about why I sometimes go a long time between DW posts, my process here was literally: a) I can't post the friend meme comment until I've made the DW post to link to; b) I can't make the DW post until I've made the Tumblr post to link to; c) I can't make the Tumblr post until I have scanned the comics; d) I can't scan the comics until I have dug the scanner out of the pile behind the couch; e) I will deal with the pile behind the couch sometime after hell freezes over.

1. For those of you who were at the party last night, I looked it up, and "Natural Harvest" says that semen has approximately the same textural qualities in cooking and baking as egg white, so you probably wouldn't need extra stiffeners. ^_^

2. Also, Riddles of the Exeter Book, our grand and noble heritage as English speakers, and 100% definitely what really happened in "Riddles in the Dark", someone ellenfremedon should write that version.

3. So I didn't quite manage the October challange to finish at least five wips so I could earn the right to do NaNo; I'm actually REALLY CLOSE but when it came down to the wire I said "screw it" and went to bed early instead. oops. So as punishment, instead of NaNo, I have decided I have to add at least 1500 words to one of my wips every day in November.

To aid this effort, last week (...when I could have been writing) I went through and made a new Scrivener file that includes every story I have worked on but not finished in the past three-and-some years. It has 154 files, containing 294,856 words, divided into four main folders: "WIPs", "WIPs that I claimed were finished and posted to AO3 anyway", "stories that exist only as outlines", and "notfic and ficlets I could expand". Along with some original fiction and nonfiction stuff, there are approximately 63 different fandoms represented.

(compare this to my complete fic posted to AO3, where there are 104 stories with 97 different fandom tags, and 284875 total words. --there's overlap there, though, due to the 'WIPs I claimed were finished and posted anyway" category, though only about 50,000 words' worth. Of course AO3 represents over ten years' output as opposed to three-and-a-bit.)

Anyway I will be posting the stories I worked on and how many words here periodically, to motivate myself, under the tag 'nanowrimo' if you care. Also I have realized I have a bunch of money I budgeted to give away this year that I've spent hardly any of, so to sweeten the pot, every time I finish a WIP this month I will donate 1% of its wordcount (in dollars) to a semi-related good cause of some sort. whooo.

So far I have:

• Added 850 words to the one where Bucky Barnes is a Yankees fan, because when even the Hydra Trash Party thinks that's going too far, I can think of no better endorsement.


• Wrote 850 words of the next bit of the aNitLO megacrossover, since it matches my Halloween costume.

So I'm not technically behind until I go to bed tonight without writing anything more!

4. Harry Potter LJ fandom is apparently having a reunion party this week. I'm not sure if I'll do anything for it (...finish a ten-year-old HP wip, maybe?) but I think there's still some old HP friends hanging around here who might be interested.

1. I went to a Les Mis fan meetup in DC on Saturday! We went to the National Gallery of Art and then to dinner in Chinatown. It was fun! Since it was mostly Tumblr-only people I wrote it up on tumblr first, but reposting here for posterity, because Tumblr.

( Les Mis DC Meetup )

2. I know there are some of you who would find this relevant who wouldn't have seen it on tumblr, so I just thought you ought to know that Diane Duane wrote about marriage in the Five Kingdoms, including a tiny ficbit of Herewiss/Wyn that is ADORABLE.

(...I still want to write fic someday that covers all the sub-relationships in that marriage. Series of 128 drabbles?)

3. I got a new computer mike! It's ... much better than the inbuilt one, though not exactly a paragon of quality. Anyway, if I'm really doing this podcast thing, I should practice sound editing, so the first five people who give me a comment selecting 500 words or so of fanfic by either them or me will get a beginner's podcast of it. :D

So, the old truism about how if you look for answers, you'll find them - just possibly to a different question - is proven once again. I went and finally read The Big Meow in order to "research" hardboiled fiction, and instead, I realized who I needed for my next ace manifesto: Rhiow, the ffeih manager of all the New York City worldgates.

The Big Meow, by the way, is not nearly as noir as that title implies, at least not so far, although their are hints it may move in that direction. The Big Meow is the third book in the Cat Wizards series, themed around '40s Hollywood and experimentally being written as a professional online serial, and it got as far as Chapter Eight before life happened to the author and it hasn't been updated in several years now, which leaves YW fandom in the interesting place of having an abandoned online WIP in their canon. And I know I have no right to talk about people leaving WIPs hanging, but I really really want it to be finished. Especially if she's going where it seems like she's going with ace Rhiow/Hwaith, within a noir context (Although more than I want it finished I just want some sign that dduane still knows where the internets is. :/ I never thought I'd see the day where Le Guin had a bigger online fandom presence than Duane.)

Speaking of leaving WIPS hanging! There's that Top Gear Big Bang I unwisely signed up for that I really do need to get moving on at this point. I'm only signed up for 10,000 words, and I've done 10,000 words before - in fact I have 10,000 of Top Gear WIP sitting on my hard drive right now - and yet I still am not holding my breath, because I have not *finished* anything over 10,000 words.

But I'm going to try anyway! I have started a thing of putting on Write or Die for 1,000 words every night before bed, and even if so far all I've written is Dresden Files idfic, who knows, I may actually manage some longer finished fiction this year.

I need to pick an idea to write for the Big Bang, though. So I'm putting it up for a vote. Feel free to vote for whichever one, even if a) I don't know you; b) you don't know me; c) you don't know Top Gear, or d) you have no intention of reading it regardless. I do not promise to abide by the poll numbers anyway ^_^



Here are some more details about each story to help you make up your mind (and to help me get my thoughts straight.)

( Story details & summaries )

Between getting things done in RL while listening to Dresden Files, and finally making those two recs posts, I am in that place where I've done too many of the things that had been sitting for ages on the top of on my procrastination list, and now I am at the loose ends of maybe having to do the really scary important stuff. So, instead, here is a very scattered post of things-I-have-not-been-posting-about in the form of a list:

1. I still need to write more of fenellaevangela's yuletide fic. Because she deserves better than she got. ): I know exactly what to write, I even bought myself the offline version of write-or-die with Christmas money, I just need to make myself sit and *do* it.

2. I also need to post at least another couple of pages of How The Master Stole Christmas, but I appear to have lost my copy of the original in the post-holiday cleaning, so I get to defer that until I find it again. :P

Instead, I drew an illustration for philomytha's Vorkosigan fic The Earring, featuring Lord Regent Aral Vorkosigan going slightly native on his first visit to Beta Colony. (Going slightly native in this case = wearing nothing but sandals, a tiny clingy sarong, earrings and body glitter.)

( image under cut )

Want Dresden Files/Vorkosigan crossover fic now

3. Way back before the holiday, I posted my second entry in the Ace Manifestos Project on asexual_fandom: Charlie Weasley, the closest we will get to canon, and I don't think I ever linked it here, so here it is.

The ace manifestos project is still chugging along! And still taking sign-ups; we just had people claim John Sheppard and Castiel (finally!) but there's plenty more to go. I am debating what I want to claim for a third one, but all my first ideas would be hard, and I want to keep doing something I can just chuck out a few paragraphs of meta and some links on. The rest of you should sign up though, if you haven't yet!

4. I've seen that audio/dialect voice meme going around, so I thought I'd link to this: North American Dialects Survey, a study being currently run out of Yale that's looking for voice samples from people all over North America. It's just about as simple as the meme version, only For Science! And then you can do the meme one and share with your reading list. :P

5. I'm still behind on catching up with various fandoms I'm in that have current canon (the BBC RPS ones in particular. Ten o'clock live starts next week!!) I just started catching back up with lolitics, and OMG, the role-players have been on a roll since Christmas!( Cut for British Politics RPF stuff )

Also I want a Dresden Files crossover where Mandelson, Bercow, Cable, and BONE are all on the White Council together

6. RE: posting to the lolitics comm on lj: apparently I have been over on DW long enough that I have officially forgotten how to do lj tags. I had to actually look up how to do an lj user tag after failing on my first four tries.

7. CENTRAL MARYLAND IS GETTING CHEATED OUT OF SNOW. Like, three times so far this year, they've predicted a major storm in our area, and then gone "well, actually, it looks like the heavy stuff will be to the north, south, east, and west of us." !!! Not fair.

...on the upside, though, they are starting to talk about the Chesapeake Bay freezing over, and if that happens, I am okay with lack of snow.

(I know, I realize that severe winter weather can be very difficult and even disastrous for a lot of people - especially a major bay freeze, which can paralyze the ports, lead to shortages on the islands and Delmarva, and damage infrastructure - but it's also part of the climate and the culture here, and something we need. The Bay regularly froze over every 10-50 years, and it's something of a needed 'reset' button for the ecology. And, given climate change, I never expected it to happen in my lifetime - this may be the last time this interglacial that it does.)

8. Still listening to Dresden Files! Still enjoying in that trashy genre fiction sort of way! (The audiobooks also let me drag it out, since there is no more pairing!fic left for me to read, sigh.) Apparently, listening to Dresden Files right before sleep makes me have dreams about Pennsic War, and no, idk either, but it's consistent so far.

(Although, the night I put up stellar_dust's recs post, instead of Dresden Files I read two new Merlin AUs I'd missed before. One of them was about Medieval LARPing, which you'd think would trigger SCA dreams if anything did, huh? But instead I dreamed about the one with Sedoretu instead, which is okay, because I will take dreams about Le Guin poly marriages anytime.)

9. ( Here are some longer posts that I want to do soon, if I ever manage to find my round tuit. )

...okay, I suppose now I need to go work some more on the actual scary stuff, mutter.

1. Here is your silly-but-good improvised cocktail recipe for 2011. I am calling it a "Sonic Shark", mostly because I can:

Make a basic Sonic Screwdriver with lemon-lime soda, blue curaçao and plain vodka, without shaking or stirring. (If you want to do a non-alcoholic version, you could use the lemon-lime with blue raspberry soda and skip the vodka.)

Then add freshly-made whole pineapple juice, nice and pulpy, about as much as the curaçao and vodka combined. (The host of our NY party got a juicer for Christmas, you see. There has been much juicing in that house of late.) The pineapple pulp should nucleate the soda-pop, causing a sudden uprush of foam like a toy volcano, and it will also make the foam persistent, so that your drink keeps a head. Also the pineapple juice makes it yummy. :D

(Why yes, we have watched the DW Christmas special.)

2. Also finally went to see the latest Harry Potter movie yesterday. I was not unimpressed - I know you all have been saying it's good, and it was: it somehow managed to follow the book pretty much exactly and yet still make a good movie, which considering my mixed impressions of the book is saying something.

Mostly, though, it made me want to go on a long backpacking trip around Britain. (I was possibly the only person who read that book and said "I wish she'd gone into more detail on the camping!) :D Especially combined with the fact that I got A Walk in the Woods for Christmas and have read it already. (In which our author attempts to walk the Appalachian trail and spends a fair amount of time whining about how hiking in the US is so much harder than hiking in Europe. And he skipped my state entirely and *didn't even mention it*. BAH.)

Also, I spent most of my Christmas gift card money at Target on a 20°F 2.5 lb backpacker's mummy bag, marked down to half-price, which has only been on my wish list for years, and I have slept a night in it already, and we loves it, precious. (Now what is replacing it on my backpacking wishlist is a Kelly Kettle-type stove, but apparently Americans, being addicted as we are to fancy distilled-and-refined fuels, have no need of such things, because nobody seems to make them for us, which means my chances of finding a cheap used one are about zip, and the import ones are out of my budget >:| I have heard rumors that dirt-cheap samovars can be bought in some ethnic neighborhoods in big cities here but I bet they're all electric.)

Anyway I think my official goal for this year is to do a solo backpacking trip at least once. You know, once it is not winter any more.

I have finally posted more of How the Master Stole Christmas! The next two pages (both double-page spreads) are up at doctor_and_master: How the Master Stole Christmas Episode 2. It's also up at my dA account, in the SeussWho gallery, if you'd rather read there, though without the extra text-only pages.

But I am reposting the latest page on this journal anyway, because I am proud of myself and want to look at it some more :P
( Why for nine hundred years I've put up with it now! )

...I finally finished that update because I told myself I wasn't allowed to draw any lolitics girlband!AU fanart until I finished the Who-Christmas-Sing. I know, I know, normal people are motivating themselves around their yuletide at this point, but whatever, I have my plot, I have a very clever way to cheat and quadruple my wordcount, and I know I can churn out a few thousand words as soon as I make myself sit down and concentrate.

And in the meantime there is girlband!AU. :D This is the latest shared-world AU of awesome to take over the lolitics meme. I don't know - do other anon fic memes do these amazing shared AUs? The other ones I've followed haven't but then I haven't followed them as immersively. Anyway, girlband!AU involves taking the democratic leaders, past and present, of Great Britain (and occasionally other countries) and re-casting them as members of Spice-girls-esque girlpop bands. And they make so much more sense that way, OMG, just.

Plus it is helping with my ongoing feelings of guilt about being all into British politics and ignoring the US! By turning them into genderswapped shallow pop-culture celebs with zero actual relevance, instead of people who are supposed to be FIXING THE WORLD DAMMIT, I can finally get detached from policy enough to think about US politicians without wanting to stab myself in the gullet! \o/

(Yes, I know, sarken did it first with Disney Band PRT. But still I am in love! And also I have discovered Sleevage, the blog for people who are more interest in the art of album cover design than in the actual music. I just wish its search engine worked better. ... I really need to attempt to organize my blogroll again.)

(Finally) posted my Ace Manifesto last week: Fox Mulder, Ace.

(Note to self: you have run into this before, you should remember it by now, if you post an intro post to a very old, very quiet fandom, and mention that it is old and quiet, you *will* get one of the two-dozen still active people showing up in your comments being deeply offended that you didn't mention them specifically.)

And vaguely connected to that, here are two fic recs: zortified has written asexual!Ivan Vorkosigan: Uneasy Lies The Head. I'm not sure how he's done it - that seems even *less* likely than ace!Jack Harkness - but it makes me happy that it has been done, and well. :D

And to prove that vanity googling sometimes works, I just stumbled on a fic that was written based on some old meta of mine, by aria: All That Remains. It is Highlander, Methos genfic, and it is everything I want in Highlander fic. Sometimes I feel like, even if I never write anything again, the amount of awesome fic that's been written based on ideas I just threw out justifies my existence on its own. :D

***

I have been writing a bit, though. And I've just been reminded that earlier this year, I made a commitment on 12in2010 to finish at least 12 stories over 2000 words this year. I think I might actually manage 12 over 1000 words this year, which is shocking enough on its own! But a lot of it's been anon, so it is difficult to keep track of. Here (mostly for myself) is my fic accounting for the year:

( 2010 fic round-up )

The other thing I pledged to do this year was read and review at least 100 books. I think I've managed the 'read' part, given a broad enough definition of the word 'book.' Review... well, I still have almost a month to finish the reviews! (I post my book reviews on LT, where they get just enough upvotes to assure me I'm not posting into a vacuum. Would anybody be interested in them being crossposted here? I've though about it, but never gotten motivated.)

Also I am apparently posting a thing, in parts, to doctor_and_master for their December fanfest, which is apparently How the Master Stole Christmas, complete with anapests and illustrations. <_< The next bit should go up late tonight, hopefully, now that I've found my stylus (again.)

I am so used to working right up against deadlines (whether self-imposed or not) that it feels really, really weird to finish something, and then not post it immediately. I keep finishing a part, and then going a reloading e-mail automatically for feedback even though I haven't posted anything, fail.

Why yes, I have reached that point in November when I am desperately accomplishing things in order to avoid working on my NaNo! That's basically the two things I love most about NaNo: the month before, when I can give myself permission to do lots of research and pre-writing without feeling like I should be just sitting and writing the damn thing, and the tail end of the month, when the sense of impending doom gives me that feeling of last-ditch freedom and my internal editor comes off on everything else.

(Not my yuletide letter, though. In my defense, I had it 75% written and then lost it all in a browser crash - oh, DW autosave, why are you so useless? - so I'm taking a few days to mourn.)

Also in the shadow of impending doom, I have signed up for TGS Big Bang. Yes, I should have known better, but I got permission to sign up to finish the Doctor Who Crossover of Doomy Doom, which I might actually do! Or at least manage to add 10,000 words to it in two months. (Although, having added up that I already have over 8,000 in one-and-a-half chapters of a projected at least eight, I may decide to just write the prequel - preliminary title "Jez vs. Atmos" - instead.

Here are some lists of other things I want to be writing instead of NaNo or important grownup stuff or my overdue Ace Manifesto:

People who should be paired with Jamie MacCrimmon in the period between "War Games" and Season 6b:
1. Duncan Macleod
2. Lord John Grey (Seriously, why has nobody written this one yet?)
3. Nestene!Rory
4. ??? (If you can find me two more I might even manage a Five Things ^_^)

Vorkosigan Universe Fanfic that Should Be Written:
1. The AU where Cordelia let them try the fast-penta in Shards of Honor, and the whole Barrayaran mess ended up in Mehta and Taylor's laps instead.
2. The story where Aral's first wife's death was faked by Xav's wife, who smuggled her off to Beta, where she became an LPST and ended up mentoring Kareen. (Also, the story where Xav's wife retired to Beta and wound up best friends with Cordelia's mother, much to everybody's horror. Possibly writeable as a Cryoburn follow-up.)
3. The story about how one of those other uterine replicators post-Shards of Honor contained the Emperor's half-brother, and how the Emperor found out, and what happened afterward.
4. The story about the time Miles and Mark and Ivan went to Cetaganda for a diplomatic meeting and "met" (by way of finding him trying to sneak into the Barrayaran embassy) the youngest Cetagandan Prince, who looks a lot like Miles - and his Ba servitor, who looks even more like Miles - and what happened after Mark told Cordelia.
5. The story about what happened the first Emperor's Birthday after Twitter came to Barrayar, and how they talked Miles out of firebombing the headquarters of @eyespycoc (without telling him that it was Mark's idea in the first place.)

I was going to say something along the lines of, "Okay, the good thing is that I still haven't signed up for nanowrimo. I have signed up for five new volunteer things, but at least I didn't sign up for NaNo."

But then I was messing around on the meme last night, and got a bunny for something I could maybe actually write for NaNo. I could write it as RPF crack and then change the names and then maybe actually sell it without having to do more than change the names; I don't actually care too much about it and it wouldn't take a lot of research and if I write it as RPF crack I might not start to get all overambitious; and it would come out as a simple, formulaic novella-length SF/romance; and I could set my goal at "end of story" rather than 50,000 words.

Arrgggh. I was being so good about not being tempted by NaNo!

***

...The five volunteer gigs aren't quite as bad as it sounds. The Candidates' Night is one time only. And so is the Rally, if they get back to me on that, plus I was planning to be at the rally doing nothing anyway. Tag wrangling probably won't start until after Yuletide, and will probably be patchy work after that. The Environment Trust researcher position who knows, but I've been meaning to put that in for months.

...and then there's the fact that I am apparently running The Ace Manifestos Project at asexual_fandom. Which was probably an unwise thing to sign up for, but I really wanted it to happen, and I went into a fugue state and had a rules post all written, so I figured wth.

It's a pick-a-topic, pick-a-date type fest, designed to be low on the organization needed, and the community seems like it's at about the right activity level to make something like this happen without going overboard or needing to much mod work, so maybe it won't all go down in flames?

I already made one mistake: I realized that I should have made more effort to make the first-come-first-served thing fair with time zones, instead of just starting sign-ups as soon as I was ready, but it was 'do it while ou're rolling or you'll procrastinate on it forever', so it was a trade off. And people can still sign up for other iterations of the Doctor and Holmes if they want!

(And by "people" I mean all of you folks who are reading this. Yes, you too. Especially you, stellar_dust, you should sign up for Jack Harkness.)

***

Oh! And something else I did while I was doing all the things? I made an Xenokink entry on Fanlore. Since it needed one. I know some of you reading this are also into xenokink; you should go help out with the entry (and if you don't want to edit the wiki yourself, you can comment here with stuff I should change/add.)

You guys, I feel like a fic-finishing and obligation-meeting machine right now.

Not that I actually am, but I got my remix_duello fic in on time! I was going "OMG REMIXING IS HARD FOLKS" but then I realized, hey, wait, it's a remix, that means whenever I get stuck I can just crib from the original, which is *awesome*. It is probably not great by the standards of real remix connoisseurs, and I may have stretched the boundaries of what counts as a remix too much, but I'm (mostly) happy with it, and hay, meeting of deadlines happened, which means, because the AO3 challenge set-up is awesome, I now have a couple of no-pressure weeks to keep tinkering with it. Also I am looking at the melee prompts and trying to convince myself I don't need to start stories for any of them, no matter how much I want to, because I still have way too many other works in progress, plus kink_bingo and who knows what else.

I did, however, finish a five-month-standing WIP on the lolitics meme! And guys, guys, OMG, this is the first time I have *ever* finished something I started posting as a WIP and didn't finish within that first push of energy. I usually try to stay anon on these things at least for awhile but I kind of want to just strew sparkles around in general.

Also said story was coming-out and GLBT-activism themed, so it seems like a good segue into talking about Coming Out Day. Coming Out Day, as a day set up to help people claim a GLBT identity, always left me feeling left out and confused even as I was happy for the people who did come out. Because it took me a long time to find an identity I felt like I could claim. And even now that I'm fairly comfortable with it in myself? I still feel like I can't come out, like I don't belong in the coming-out narrative.

But, screw it. If I can write a fictional character's coming out, I can write my own. So, hi! You've probably already figured it out, but I don't know if I've ever exactly announced it before, so: I'm asexual, which means I have never experienced sexual attraction to anyone, male or female or other; and I'm aromantic, which means I've never particularly wanted to have a romantic relationship, or really understood what the point of them are.

( On coming out as asexual )

Anyway! I am also well in to finishing my intobar fic, weeks and weeks before the deadline! ...is there anybody who knows both Top Gear and Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars who wants to be first reader for ~3000 words worth of crossover? Since I actually have breathing space for a first reader, for once? (I suspect there *is* nobody else who's in to both Top Gear and Alan Mendelsohn, though.)

All of the above means I'm officially better off in terms of deadlines and missed deadlines hanging over my head than I was at the beginning of the summer! \o/ (By any sane standards, I'm still about to be buried, but I'm so used to that state of affairs that any lessening feels amazing.)

Also, common_nature seems to have picked up enough momentum that it might just keep rolling on its own, so I don't have that hanging over me as much either! Now I have to resist the temptation to start more communities. (The rules is no starting new communities until scheduled posting happens. No matter how much I want there to be materiality, the common_nature sister community for man-made stuff - and more_cowbell, the music sharing community for people whose main criteria for acquiring music is "I can't believe somebody actually thought it was a good idea to record that!")

And I'm, like, 75% caught up on my LibraryThing Recently-Read Reviews! Amazing. There's still, like, a whole pile of cryptozoology books, and a whole pile of Star Trek novels, and the read-not-owned list, and a huge pile of started-but-not-finished, but I am amazed that I actually broke through the block and did it at all.

Also, while I was organizing files & stuff around my new hard drive, I went ahead and updated my AO3 account and my DeviantArt account. My dA account has about a year's worth of mostly fanart added, most of which I never posted to this journal. There is some Top Gear and some Doctor Who and some of my original characters and some fiber crafts and etc.

I waver back and forth on doing more with my dA account; on the one hand, it is nice to have a place that's for visual art the way this place is for textual, and wandering there inspires me to work on my own drawing more, but on the other hand, dA's administration is pretty damn faily and has a long history of it, and it feels hypocritical to be getting more into dA when I've stormed out of LJ over much the same issues.

Does anybody know if there's a site that is to dA as DW is to LJ? At least as much ease of use, committed membership, and less admin fail? 'cause that would be nice. (Then all I'd have to do is find my stylus and maybe I'd finish more art and post it!)

Also if anybody's got a dA account and wants more watchers, let me know? I am bad at finding people but I do like having galleries to watch.

...I was going to post about the new stories on my AO3 account, but this post is already too long, so, um, later. Also, I need to stay strong and not take a week or so's worth of being on top of things, and spoil it by signing up for NaNo.

This is the handout I wrote for Sunday's panel on fandom and copyright. I am posting it here because it is fifteen freaking pages long and I hope some people will read along on their netbooks and I don't need as many paper copies. But people not at con-txt are welcome to enjoy.

This is html-converted using OpenOffice; I apologize if it's ugly, I cheated because it's, um, 5:30 AM the day of the panel and I haven't slept yet. If you would rather download a .doc file, click this link: Copyleft and Copyright Handout.

( Fandom, Copyright and Copyleft: The Basics of Intellectual Property for Fans )

So, con-txt is coming up! Sooner than I want to think about!

And I am modding or co-modding five panels!

(sometimes I hate myself.)

These are the five panels:
Fandom, Copyright, and Copyleft (with lightgetsin)
Fanmixes and Mashups (with Erin Ptah)
Procrastinators' Party (with Dee Laundry)
Sinister Ducks (no co-mod)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Slash Fandom (as a panel)

Procrastinators' Party should be easy, as a total lack of any sort of preparation for it is part of the fun! (although. Um. I have just noticed I apparently have a co-mod, and I have no idea who she is. I should shoot her a note, probably.)

Fanmixes and Mashups should be fairly easy, as I assume erin_ptah is doing any necessary prep work. :P (And if she doesn't, I can just ramble about fanmixing for as long as necessary, and then toss in a few extra handouts from the copyright panel.)

WWTAWWTASF requires me to, like, communicate with individual people on a business-correspondence level, and this terrifies me. Letters out tonight! If I have tie myself to the keyboard in the process!

And then the two panels I would like to do real prep work for, and for which I am begging for help:

Fandom, Copyright, and Copyleft: I am planning to make up a web post/handout which covers a) the basics of copyright & intellectual property in general, b) copyright issues as they apply to fanworks and fandom, c) current issues in copyright and fandom, d) intellectual property resources online and activism opportunities. lightgetsin will use her newly-minted LAWYER POWERS to check it over, if I get it to her in time, and if I don't get it to her in time, will at least be there at the panel to stop me if I say something very wrong. If any other fan-lawyer types would like to volunteer to beta it, I would be well pleased.

I have some (badly organized) bookmarks, some idea where to look for more, some printed handouts from other cons, and a vast collection of uncited info in my head. I would be really, really grateful if other people who are interested in this sort of stuff helped me out with links to resources, to important fannish discussions, and to recent events, especially: both the obvious stuff (so I don't miss it) and things I might not know about.

(especially if they are other fan communities where I could post this request!)


Sinister Ducks : this panel was submitted as a total joke! And now I have to actually make up a presentation for it! *gulp*

So, basically, the idea is that Con.txt's theme and mascot is ducks. And I have to put together a convincing (well, Discordian-style convincing) argument for how ducks are secretly plotting to take over slash fandom (hence their infiltration of Con.txt), and possibly, thereby, the WORLD. Multimedia especially needed!

Here's what I've got so far:
( Warning: contains panel spoilers )

I know there's more than this, I just haven't kept proper track of where they are. I can take a side turn here - either by way of Red Green's giant Duct Tape Duck, and then on to duct tape in general (hello mythbusters!) - or by way of comics, everything from Darkwing Duck to Talespin - or veer off into swans (the Swan Boat Of Doom on Top Gear! Anything involving J.Weir! Hot Fuzz! The Pirate King!) Also there is a Creepy Duck Puppet that will be watching you. But it would be much more convincing if I had more video footage from classic slash fandoms.

So! Internets at large! I call to you for help! Where are the scenes in your fandom of choice (of any sort of fandom) in which ducks appear? It doesn't have to be pivotal, it doesn't have to be sinister, it doesn't have to be slashy (though any of those would be great, of course) they just have to be there. Were there ducks on the Starfleet Academy grounds, or in the holodeck? Have any of House's patients ever been infected by a duck? Is there a video game with ducks in that I should know about? Has Merlin ever turned into a duck? Are there "atmosphere" scenes with Vs of ducks traveling overhead that you wouldn't even notice unless you were visually oriented and watching very closely? Is there a sound effect that is eerily ducklike?

...help.

I signed up for kink_bingo this year! I love how accessible they're making it: low pressure, the minimum is one 500-word story in a year, and they've emphasized that you don't have to be able to write explicit sex or sexual characters in order to play, so I'm fairly sure I can do it. My card:
( My Card )
So everybody's going on and on about their kink_bingo cards, and how lucky they are, and I looked at mine and went "huh."

I don't think *any* of the kinks I was really excited about ended up on it, and the two stories-in-progess I'd been planning to use at cheats - each of which have so many kinks they could conceivably blackout a card on their own, with no overlap - are barely represented on the card at all.

I guess that serves me right! Anyway it'll be fun, even if I only end up managing one meta post or something.

I would like to note that as I was going through the kink_wiki yesterday, exploring my options, the questions I was coming up with were things like "Would a story about someone whose erogenous zones are primarily tactile negotiating a scene with someone whose erogenous zones are primarily aural (involving sonics that person A can't produce) work for the 'silence' square?" and "does crossdressing have to involve gender, or can it involve someone whose species doesn't wear clothing dressing up as a human?" and "is 'accidental soulbond with a mechanical life-form due to shoddy safety measures during repair work' suitable for the 'electricity' square?" and "Can I do 'wrist/ankle restraints' on somebody whose limbs don't exactly fit those categories?"

... which just goes to show what pairings I have been getting bunnies for lately. Actually, having gone down the entire kink list, there are only four kinks which require somebody to have a humanoid or vaguely humanoid body (five, if you count 'shaving', which requires a mammalian one at least) and I got three of them...

I also went out to work last night without actually remembering what was on my card, and I ended up plotting out in my head an amazing story - for a kink that's not on my card. But now I really, really want to write "How Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex Invented Strip Personality Chess, And What Happened Afterward." (Does kink_bingo give out prizes for "most stories written for the wrong card"?)

...I may at least have to write a Bran/Tru 'ship manifesto, since Mymy/Vyssu/Mav has been such a hit. :D ...and I'm so tempted to try for a bingo with all non-human or cross-species pairings.


Anyway I was going to try to make this short, but this *is* me, and it's an excuse to talk about kink and about ideas for stories I'll probably never write, so here's ( some brainstorming for every square )

Things I said to Mom's Sunday school class while last-minute substituting as teacher today:

1. So Jesus got, like, really pissed, and he totally trashed the whole place, dude. It was radical.

2. Why can't God be a girl if He wants to be? He can do anything; who says She's never a girl? (this got a cheer from the girls in the class, p.s.)

3. A fast overview of every Judas-apologia fanfic ever written for the Easter story, from the Acts of Pilate to the Gospel of Pilate, with a long digression about how by Easter the disciples were spending most of their time bickering like siblings who had been trapped in a car for too long.

Things I almost said, but stopped myself at the last minute:

1. Jesus hates teabaggers! (I didn't actually say that but I laid the groundwork. And I want a bumpers sticker now that says "God Hates Teabaggers: Matthew 22:21") I felt unexpectedly justified when Pastor decided to preach his sermon about how the Democrats in Congress are like Christ Triumphant riding into Jerusalem (let us strew roses at their feet) and the Republicans are just like the Pharisees and Sadduccees. :P

2. The reason they didn't listen was because it was women who saw them, because nobody ever listens to women, but remember that Christ spoke to girls first, before he spoke to the men; he believes we're the ones worth talking to first. (I almost said this but we were running out of time and I figured "God's a chick" was enough Christian radical feminism to start them with.)

3. Aslan is a fraud and Narnia sucks. (Didn't actually mention Lewis, but talked about *why* Aslan is a fraud. Also, didn't say "Jesus is more like a Time Lord than a Highlander," or compare "He will knock four times" to "before the cock crows thrice." Be proud of me.)


Let that stand as your warning: as today was Palm Sunday, and it's my very favorite Christian holiday, I plan to talk about Christianity, and specifically Holy Week and Easter, a lot for the next week. It will be in rather the same sort of tone as the above. If you'd rather not be exposed, filter or unsubscribe me; I won't be offended. It will be back to business-as-random-usual come Monday after next.

con_txt has their first call for panels! Hooray!

Con.txt is a small slash con held near DC every two years, if you haven't heard of it. (badge prices go up at the end of the month!) It is my happy place.

I ran an utterly ridiculous number of panels at con.txt two years ago, and I have, um, kind of been thinking about panels I want next time ever since then. The first call is for panels that might require extensive preparation by the mods. Here's what I'm thinking about submitting: any thoughts or suggestions?

1. Ducks!: From Star Wars to Good Omens and beyond, ducks permeate all of our fandoms. What is their sinister plan of total domination? And is there still time to stop it? Your moderators will present extensive evidence of the conspiracy, including handouts, followed by group discussion about such important questions as "Jensen Ackles and David McCallum: Double Agents?" and "Did Bert and Ernie curse Slash fandom?"

2. GIMP graphics workshop: Offering another Fannish Graphics in GIMP, the open source graphics editor, this year; either a "basic crop & text icons" like last time, or even a slightly less basic one (easy photomanip techniques or getting started with coloring scanned lineart.) Or *possibly* a basic & a less basic, if there's demand.

3. How To Build a Community: How to start a fannish community, gather a tightly-knit membership, and keep posting active in the community; strategies, methods, and examples. You don't have to go viral to thrive. (Preferably, have at least one moderator who has done this successfully!)

4. Cosplay: why is there so little visibility of costuming in (most of) media fandom? Where is the cosplay for these fandoms? Can we have some at con-txt please? (Also, come to the panel in costume! Show off!) Plus, cosplay & crossplay basics for newcomers to the art, fannish fashion, and perhaps a box of dress-up clothes. ETA: with emphasis on cosplay strategies for people who don't have Hollywood-standard bodies.

5. Vidding for the Technically Inept (and Flat Broke): How to start with a DVD or download, and rip, clip, and synchronize to music. Overview of free or cheap software for clipping and video and audio editing; making do with limited hardware; good resources for self-teaching.

6. Finding deep time: Sometimes it seems like all of fandom before 2003 is invisible these days - and even more recent events are more difficult to document than they could be. Resources & techniques for learning and/or sharing about pre-lj (and pre-internet) fandom; ethical questions in informal fandom research; and a beginner's guide for contributing to Fanlore & TWC. Aimed at non-academic contexts but aca-fen welcome.

I volunteer to mod 1 & 2, unless someone else wants to; will mod 3 & 4 only if they can't get someone better-qualified; and am totally not qualified to mod 5 & 6, but I could flip flip-charts!

(Ideas I have for less-prep-intensive panels for the later call for panels: Fanmixer's round table; when RPS isn't real aka "Stephen" vs. Stephen; attempts at defining this thing we call 'fandom'; "Boston Marriage", or, when the subtext goes too far; and discussion circle on asexuality & slash )

The internets has refused to cough up a proper cocktail recipe for scumble, and so I wish to inform them that 80-proof apple jack mixed 50-50 with ginger beer is yummy, and it's also lethal, because my body seems to think it's apple soda and I drink entire gulps before I realize that it's actually rather distinctly alcoholic.

(The stash of drinks has no vodka, but my sister and Rachel Maddow together have made me interested in cocktails. So sister had sonic screwdrivers with tequila instead of vodka & I had moscow mules with applejack instead & called them scumble.)

(Actually we had vodka, but it's double-caffeinated espresso vodka. Our hostess has been drinking it straight for several hours and is now both lit and wired. How festive, just like her non-demoninational holiday shrub!)

We watched A Colbert Christmas and then have spent the past several hours watching DVDs of all the Otakon vid shows for the entire decade of the nineties (because the parties I go to are just that cool), including the very first vid I ever saw (which was Ryoga Hibiki doing I Would Walk 500 miles in 1995. btw.) I am thinking about how much those old-school AMVs, especially in the humor vids that had a particular way of using literal matching of lyrics & images while completely (deliberately) mismatching tone & mood, shaped my vid aesthetic. Or I would be if it wasn't three o'clock in the morning and I hadn't drunk quite so much scumble.

Also I appear to have crocheted a mauve Dalek.

Everybody who is here tonight drew a party spink. Three guesses which was mine and the first two don't count! Hint: it is the Doctor Who one.

Now I am waiting impatiently for yuletide reveals. Perhaps I will drink some sherry and then attempt to write fic!

My resolution for the year: I am going to start actually finishing creative projects instead of just talking about how awesome they would be if I actually finished them. (To aid me in doing that, I am going to do more talking about them, too.)

Also I am going to get a job. And make some money.

So, uh... Hi all! My laptop is broked. (I would say "b0rked", but that implies something far more sophisticated. And "broken" implies something far less stupid.)

This is not a disaster - for those of you who only found me since Dreamwidth, I break my laptop on a fairly regular basis; in the ~3 years I've had this one, it's had a switch break off the chassis, started to rattle ominously when shaken, needed an entire reformat and reinstall after a virus infection, had the lcd screen start to just sort of wander around inside the case, needed three power cord repairs, then a new power cord and a new battery, and then had the entire power socket break out of the chassis and need to be disassembled and pulled free.

On the upside, it reminds me to back up my data! ^_^ So nothing is lost, and I know exactly what's wrong - the much-battered socket has had a wire break, and I just need to either solder the wire back on, or replace it with a socket cannibalized from another laptop - alas, it broke off right at the socket, so it is beyond the help of tape and splicing. (Unless I want to go the "whack it with a hammer and then tape the wires it directly to the plug" route. Which is what I was doing from the other end before I got my new power cord.) And the computer itself is perfectly fine - I just don't have any way to recharge it once this last battery charge dies. And ibowieh3, the person I usually exploit for hardware assistance and solder, left on a weeklong business trip yesterday.

For now, I'm on the backup computer, which is the eight-year-old desktop with three hard drives and two OSs, neither of which boot so I'm running it on a Puppy Linux livecd, which works fine for most stuff. But it's too damn slow to do much graphics stuff (and I never quite got my scanner and tablet working with it), and considering I'm doing finishing on a three-day-a-week webcomic, this is probably not sustainable. What I'm probably going to do is bite the bullet and finally install Ubuntu on the hard drive that's currently got a kernel panicky Red Hat 7, since I've heard Ubuntu is a) easy and b) good at memory management. (For the record, this is what happened the last time I tried to install Linux.) Best case, it's all up and running better than ever. ...worst case, it's back to the livecd and I have a newly-formatted empty hard drive.

Well, I mean, worst case is I catch the computer on fire, but that's probably not a *very* high chance.

Hi! I am still way behind on internets stuff (I have something like twenty fic tabs up, and yes, damned_colonial, I'll do those AoS posts eventually), but I did at least catch up on comments to my own posts, and related things.

It's been ages since I had a post with collapsed comments; I forget how much sheer *time* it takes to stay abreast, not to mention social energy. And I now have more people watching this account than I had watching my LJ at any point over the five years I had it. So - hi? I have no idea how people with hundreds of circle people do it.

I also read a bunch of the other 13th Child posts, and all the ST responses I had open, commented on a bunch of them, and then rapidly lost track of which ones I needed to reply back to. Oops.

But! The poll has spoken! starry_sea exists! If you want to get in on me trickling out fair copies of all the pirate TOS e-books I torrented, you should join. Also you should join if you want to talk about ST:TOS, the Star Trek books, why the new movie missed the point but was fun anyway, and the other sorts of ST things I tend to maunder on about. Also if you would like to come on as a co-mod, please speak up; I tend to be very laid-back about modding and co-modding. I will hopefully have an intro post up by tomorrow, and some book re-read stuff shortly thereafter.

Also, one thing I kept seeing in the movie reaction posts was people who liked the movie but had no inspiration to write fic about it. I had the opposite reaction: I never had much inspiration to fic for the original continuity (well, except in Rihannsuverse), partly because there was so much already there. But the movie hit that balance for me of "this is fun and full of interesting bits, but it's actually really terrible" that makes me want to fic it.

So here, for sharing, are the stories I now want to write about ST:Reboot. Please write them (or link me to them), so I don't have to:
( Six stories, and shockingly, only one is about McCoy. )