Dresden Files! For which I have to do Dresden/Marcone, even though canon gives us many (many many many) other intriguing possibilities.

Harry Dresden and John Marcone are one of those interestingly unbalanced foeyay pairs - Harry think John is an irredeemably evil, untrustworthy criminal scumbag. John thinks Harry is a generally competent and reliable colleague with whom he shares a lot of goals and values and with whom he would enjoy working more closely someday, should the occasion arise. Harry has no idea what to do with this because, forget all the rest, nobody has ever treated him like he was competent, reliable, and pleasant to work with before in his life.

(Harry is also the world's least reliable narrator, about everything but his own feelings most of all, which always makes shipping extremely entertaining, at least until you hit the point in canon where you go... oh. oh no. the author thought that bit of Harry's POV was actually accurate???)

Have some all-time favorites of mine.

• Enemy Mine (145371 words) by gremble
  Chapters: 16/16
  Fandom: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Harry Dresden/Johnny Marcone
  
  Sometimes a date isn't just a date.



• Mafia traditions (4136 words) by forestgreen
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Harry Dresden/Johnny Marcone
  
  Sometimes a date *is* just a date, but then it ends up on the front page of the paper and none of your friends and relations will *believe* you when you try to tell them it was just a date!



• Black Magic Woman (5114 words) by binz, beachkid, shiplizard
  Fandom: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher, Dresden Files - All Media Types
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Harry Dresden/John Marcone
  Additional Tags: Kinkmeme, Drag Queen, Pre-Relationship, Community: dresden_kink, Drag
  
  Sometimes it's actually a work meeting, but your associate insists on meeting at a drag club just to be obnoxious, and then the starring act turns out to be the last person you ever expected to see in drag.



• Sympathetic Magic (11860 words) by Nemo_the_Everbeing
  Fandom: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Harry Dresden/John Marcone
  Additional Tags: Snark, The Apocalypse Made Them Do It, Magic
  
  Sometimes it's not a date at all, but the options were "sex ritual" or "human sacrifice" so you decided to pick the first one and just pretend really hard.

So anyway, in an attempt to get all settled before NaNo/YT season, I've been trying to get all my fanfic wips in one place (no, all of them, back to the last century) and man, there's a lot of good stories in there that are never going anywhere. :/ It makes me sad that nobody will ever see them, but not sad enough to do all the canon review + writing work that would be required to finish them.

Here, reading list, have 7500 words of Harry Dresden and John Marcone written c. 5 years ago, before Ghost Story came out. Featuring huddling for warmth. In a Canadian shack. In a blizzard. With bonus soulbonds and spirit animals and marriage-of-convenience and fuck-or-die. And, apparently, mpreg and pot. I wonder how many other random tropes I was planning to throw in here before I remembered that I can't write feels.

( Tiger, tiger, burning bright )

I am back from Chicago! Or possibly more accurately, Back From Evanston, since getting all of stellar_dust's moving and settling in taken care of took longer than expected, and we really only went into the city proper on one day. Also, she unexpectly had no internet, television signal, or radio in the new apartment yet, so we were pretty much completely cut off from the modern information flow - I know more about local Evanston gossip from last week than I did about the apparently really! important! things! that have been happening in the wider world. It was kind of nice.

( Evanston )


On our final day in town we did actually take the el into the city; we basically just wandered from the Cloud Gate down to the Field Museum and said 'hi' to Sue, but that was pretty cool! The Cloud Gate is *much* larger and more awesome than I had realized from the description, thus I am giving it its proper name, which it has totally earned. :P My favorite bit is that if I walk through it, only looking up, I really do feel as if I'm stepping off the edge of the world when I come out the other side, and stumble. (someone needs to write a Dresden Files fic about what happens if you let a wizard lead you through the Cloud Gate.)

The overwhelming impression I got, walking down Chicago's tourist promenade, is that Chicago is prosperous. Chicago is a city that can spend money on pretty stuff just because it's shiny! Create new parks and public spaces! Do exciting things by working together as a community! There are new-looking skyscrapers *everywhere*! Etc. This is an impression I don't get in Baltimore and Washington, the cities I know best, which are mostly struggling to keep things from falling over. (It might also be a false impression, because OMG some of the bridges the trains went over in other parts of the city were scary-looking.) But in general Millennium Park is pretty much what American cities were supposed to be in the 21st Millennium.

( Field Museum )

The other thing I brought back from Chicago was a head cold, apparently. Oh joy.

...okay, that hypothetical crossover meme has reached levels of ludicrosity previously unattained on this journal.

Here is a list of fills so far:

Dresden Files/Vorkosigan Saga for isis (consisting of some extra bits of canon for the crossover I already wrote for this.)
Temeraire/Princess Bride ideas for finch
Pinkwaterverse/Cthulhu mythos for seekingferret (in which I fail miserably; surely *somebody* can come up with a better one?)
--seekingferret does Major League Baseball/The pirate Rabbi and Thor/Star Trek to my prompts
White Collar/Pirates of the Caribbean and DCU/The Lone Gunmen for elf. (Somebody needs to write a pirates/white collar crossover actually. Desperately. Also need fic now where Frohike tangos with Barbara Gordon, but that's a given.)
some flailing as regards Temeraire/Sherlock Holmes for ellen_fremedon
British Comedian RPF/Vorkogisan Saga for marginaliana (This one got kind of out of hand after lannamichaels tapped in. It probably helps to note that we were borrowing some of the characterization from a previous conversation regarding Aral Vorkosigan, Epic Troll. Also: this article on how traditional Chinese stand-up has fared under communism which I incidentally already had bookmarked, yes I did background research for this bit.) marginaliana asked for a British Comedy RPF crossover and I'm afraid in the elaboration we focused almost entirely on the Barrayar part, but I promise if I actually wrote it there would be a bunch of scenes of David and Charlie and Jimmy and Dara and so on meeting in hidden, poorly-lit back rooms at the university and playing at revolution.
Avengers/Sesame Street for lannamichaels. An excuse to write fic for the Teeny Little Super Guy! Yay!
Homestuck/Colbert Report for erinptah, featuring unbridgeable idealogical differences. And stabs. Mostly stabs.
Homestuck/Vorkosigan Saga for biichan. In which there are fantrolls.
Homestuck/Ranma 1/2 for terajk, featuring brownbetty and biichan contributing their own versions as well, which we must encourage them to write. yes.


Unfilled, still to do (list mostly for my reminder):
Avengers/Young Wizards and Vorkosigan/Avengers (I really need to watch that movie, I guess)
Something Sutcliff/Rihannsu-ish (Every time I poke at this I just come out concluding I need to re-read Rihannsu more. Tragic!)


This is actually an interesting way to find out what fandoms my commenters care about! Avengers yes (kind of obviously) but there's lots of Vorkosigan and Homestuck and Temeraire on there too, hmm.

And yes, I will still fill prompts if people leave them. Not crossovered out yet!

And as usual, all bunnies and notfic posted by me here are completely available for other people to pick up and run with, if you should chance to be so inspired.

So I went ahead did an AO3 dump of the stuff that is both finished and archive-worthy from Round 3 of the Dresden Files kink meme, with six more works. The two boy wizards named Harry are now tied for most stories on my AO3 account! (also I now have exactly 69 stories up, snicker.) Looking at these in a set: wow, I appeared to be working through all sorts of standard slash tropes. Also: a lot more Marcone-heavy than I thought at the time.

Title: Mu
Summary: A monk asked Jõshû, "Has a dog the Buddha Nature?"
Words: 1,297
Notes: For a prompt in which Mouse gets turned into a human. Obviously my first thought was that Mouse and Hendricks would be a matched set! So this is Mouse and Hendricks being a matched set (possibly will eventually get used for kink_bingo, despite being aggressively gen: also quotes Barrayar and Eagle of the Ninth on the subject of hounds.)

Title: The Ballad of Lord John and Lord Harry
Summary: This is some fragmentary pieces of a traditional ballad recorded a century or so ago on the fringes of the Chicagolands. It's clearly related to the myth cycle called "the Matter of Chicago", but it seems to carry the relationship in a different direction, and may be based on different source material, including bits incorporated from unrelated traditional ballads.
Words: 1,847
Notes: Somebody asked for a Robin Hood AU with John as Robin and Harry as Marion. So of course I went and looked up the Robin Hood Child Ballads. And then started re-writing all the Harry/John scenes from the books in medieval ballad meter. La. (I still kind of what to continue this - at least until I get to the Dead Beat section, which is of course in Norse alliterative verse. As is the Changes section.)

Title: On the East Wind
Summary: Harry Dresden has no idea what he's getting into when he decides to save two little girls who live in a house that belongs to Gentleman Johnny Marcone.
Words: 5,162
Notes: Somebody wanted a classic nanny AU, with Ivy and Amanda as Marcone's daughters. I think I ended up writing it, even though nanny!AU is pretty off track for the sort of thing I've been writing lately, mainly because a) I was tired of AUs where non-blood-related characters suddenly are, with no explanation (genetics doesn't work that way!) and b) I was tired of stories where Amanda wakes up from a decade in a coma and shows no long-term effects from her injury at all. So this has Ivy and Amanda as Marcone's foster kids, and an Amanda who is out of the coma but working with severe traumatic brain injury.

Title: Pray for us sinners
Summary: The great thing about ectoplasm is that, unlike blood, it never leaves stains.
Words: 1,590
Notes: This is me, writing blatant Harry/John hurt/comfort emoporn! Something else that's at bit off my usual track. Enjoy.

Title: Elements of Harmony
Summary: Baron Marcone's first impression of Princess Celestia's crack negotiating team was that they were very young.
Words: 1,553
Notes: Ah, random crossover crack. And now we're back to normal. Trivia note: the shortest Way from Chicago to Equestria starts in the treehouse in the Carpenters' yard.

Title: life's like this you
Summary: Cats, of course, don't have to deal with quadrants. Cats just find another cat they have feelings for, and go for it. I sometimes think cats are smarter than humans. "You know, Mister," I said, "I bet that if I lived in a world where us humans kept things as simple as you cats do, all of this would be a lot less complicated."
Words: 2,232
Notes: Yeah, the troll romance AU was me. I still think my version of Auspisticeship makes more sense. Also: hello Homestuck fandom! this story already has 4x the hits of any of the others in this set.


Anyway, I realized belatedly why it seemed like this was way more Marcone-heavy than I remembered: when I go through my DF-related wips, 6 out of the 10 have no Marcone in them at all, even as a minor character. So it's not that I only write Marcone stories; it's that I write short, silly Marcone stories, and everything else drags on forever unfinished. Bah.

(Summaries of the aforesaid WIPs, in three words or less, so I don't forget about any more of them: Harry's cowboy ex; Bob doms Harry; Harry you tease; shack, snowstorm, soulbond; glass slippers, incest; True Thomas; oh god why; Diefenbaker/Tera West OTP; Harry/Molly chastity play; old devil blues. Now I just need to do something about them. Oh, and finish reading Changes. Finally.)

Um. You know a while back, I mentioned I was working on a Tale of the Five/Dresden Files crossover? And then later said I wanted to post more about Tale of the Five? Well. I have about 4000 words of crossover fic, and it's kind of at a stopping point, and if I go past here, it seems to want to be an epic multi-part series, so I figured I'd just post what I have for now, in the interests of getting more Herewiss & Sunspark out there.

Also, regarding me posting more of this eventually (either the Herewiss story or the rest of the five not!Harry crossovers): note the epigraph. The epigraph is very profound.

Title: Fire Working
Fandoms: Jim Butcher - The Dresden Files & Diane Duane - Tale of the Five (Middle Kingdoms/Door series)
Summary: Herewiss goes through a Door that is probably not the Door into Starlight, and meets a man who uses the Fire.
Notes: ~4000 words, canon relationships, general audiences. This should be comprehensible for people who know only one of the two series (and possibly even for people who know neither) though I'd love to know where you got lost if you do. Will be posted to AO3 after 3W4DW.

( I feel like I've been making backwards progress. )

(Here are some things that might or might not happen in continuations I may or may not write: Hope vs. HarrowHeart; experimental Sharing of souls [and other bits]; Bob saying, 'See? 1500 years and Sunspark's still a sore loser; you have to let me out for a rematch, boss;' Harry playing Ring of Fire on a lute; Uriel.)

List of fic I am not currently writing, no, absolutely not:

"Four times it wasn't Harry, and one time it was":
1. Wherein Herewiss s'Hearn and Sunspark go through a Door looking for other men who have the Fire, and meet Harry Dresden and Bob the Air Elemental instead, and there is a lot of playing around with Soulfire/Flame and annoying of Wardens and Wardresses (and possibly setting buildings on fire. Or sex.)
2. Wherein Howell Jenkins is trying to visit Wales but winds up somewhere under Edinburgh instead, and gets help from a certain Warden in staying under the Council's radar.
3. Wherein Har of Osterland, searching for a rumor of a shadow of Suth, instead meets a strange wizard of winter's ice in the Northern Wastes and plays a riddle-game with him.
4. Wherein the enchanter Sir Harold Shea is visiting Queen Mab and Queen Titania as an emissary of Queen Gloriana, and provides a much-needed dose of scientific rationality and clinical psychiatry to everyone involved.
5. Wherein Harry Callahan is never letting Dairine do a transit spell for him ever again, Ways are walked, and parenting advice is exchanged.


"Five More Days In Paradise"
1. In which Kincaid and Murphy visit Hawaii on a working holiday, and bring Ivy along this time. Lots of things blow up, Detective Kelly remembers their last visit all too well, and Ivy makes a new friend and gets to swim with the dolphins.
2. In which Joe Dawson and Adam Pierson came to Hawaii for a quiet retirement, which seems slightly at odds with the mysterious headless bodies and localized lightning storms that 5-0 keeps hearing reported on their private beach.
3. In which Danny Williams refuses to believe there is a full-rigged pirate ship just offshore, even after Captain Jack Sparrow shanghais him onboard. (Well, for definitions of "shanghai" that involve Steve, flirting and a lot of rum.)
4. In which Danny is uncertain why it is 5-0 who are explaining why they're in Hawaii to a couple of Canadian cops, but the phrase "killers of his father" gets bandied around a lot.
5. In which Superboy meets Steve McGarrett. And territorial displays happen.

...on the plus side, I seem to be mostly out of my all-RPF phase for now.

This morning we went yard sailing! I am thinking that maybe this year, as the season starts to wind up, I will try to blog my yard sailing for the year, because I keep getting in conversations where I realize that lots of people don't really understand how seriously skewed by idea of "buying stuff" is as a result of a lifetime of yard sailing. Plus it might be fun just to have a record.

So, here ( Record of purchases )

Yard sailing, by the way, is why I missed most of the stuff that I am supposed to be nostalgic about from the '80s, and by that of course I mean Saturday morning cartoons. Because sure, we could have gotten up early on Saturday and parked in front of the TV, but instead we got up early, strapped on our roller skates and our $.25 allowance money, and went exploring all over the back roads of the county and buying cool stuff!

And that is a totally smooth segue into: I am still watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

Also: totally crossing it over with Dresden Files. Look, if you need any more evidence that Twilight Sparkle basically is Harry Dresden, just watch Feeling Pinkie Keen from about 15 minutes in: complete with laciviously wisecracking lab assistant, pyromanical anger management issues, complicated relationship with faith, heroism lemming-ness, and all. Although admittedly Twilight is the protege of the Summer Queen rather than the Winter Queen, but that's because Equestria's Winter Queen wasn't really in any position to mentor anybody until Twilight Sparkle brought Summer fire to Arctis Tor. (Rarity is obviously Thomas, Pinkie Pie must be Butters if only because they're the only two people in history to have saved an entire town with a one-man-polka-band, and Rainbow Dash is probably Murphy. I am not so sure about Apple Jack, though - one of the Carpenters? And I am stuck on Fluttershy.)

One of the things I like about Dresden Files - and one of the reasons why it's so much fun to cross it over with really girly things like My Little Pony and color-coded dragons - is that DF is a canon with a lot of powerful women in it. And I don't mean Strong Female Characters - I mean women with enough power to crush any given male character with just their pinky finger, who are not at all hesitant about using it and don't get punished just for having it, and male characters who are very, very well aware of what these women can do.

Even characters like Harry (the wizard) and Marcone (the mob boss) and Michael (the knight), who seem like they're full of traditional male power, aren't really. Harry gets a lot of his power through Lash (spiritual), and Luccio (temporal), and his power in a magical sense comes in large part through his mother and his fairy godmothers. Marcone's power in the magical world comes mostly through the favor of Gard, and she works for him very much on her own terms, and while Amanda and Helen are more or less his fridge motivation, yes, Helen at least is a powerful figure in her own right who acts in her own interest (and survives above all.) Even Michael the Knight of the Cross has Charity behind him like a sovereignty maiden in an Arthurian romance, making it possible for him to act at all. And then there's Maeve and Lily and Murphy and Ivy and Molly and Elaine and Susan and Lara and Mavra and ...

I mean, I guess it's kind of inevitable in a series that started as a mash-up of hardboiled fiction and fairy tales, because those are both genres that are obsessed with women's power, and women's power being dangerous. But it is so amazing to have all of these awesome - in the original sense of tremble-in-fear awe-inspiring - women to play with. It takes real effort to leave out the women in Dresden Files fandom.

Which isn't to claim that Dresden files is some kind of shining light of feminism, or even anything less than frequently deeply faily when it comes to gender and sex, but it makes it a heck of a lot easier to forgive the fail when I know that for every time Harry does something face-palmingly douchey involving women, Mab will do something even worse to him, or Lara will effortlessly manipulate him into being her catspaw, or Charity will narrow her eyebrows at him and turn his bones to jelly, or Murphy will give him a dose of sweet reason + aikido and he'll have to apologize and admit he's in the wrong, and Harry will just have to sit there and take it because he's utterly unable to do anything about it.

What the heck, am I actually writing?

(Also, what the heck am I actually writing?)

I'm just going to give in and do a progress bar, so I can stare at it in crogglement:


...that's a little over 10,000 words since this time last week. Nearly all of that was on the same fic: folks, the anon fill-of-shame I am currently working on over on That Kink Meme is about to hit 10,000 words on its last part, which will make it the longest fic I have ever finished, by about twice again. Why must something like this happen with a fill-of-shame?

And while I'm at it, does anyone know a good way to get a Word Count option into the right-click context menu for .txt files in Windows XP? I swear I got it working once, but then I had to re-install windows, and I never made it work again. The issue is that all the simple wordcount programs I can find are command-line dos, and when windows explorer pulls up a DOS window from a context menu command, it won't keep it open long enough for me to read the freaking output. Help?

====

And now it is time for a fanart dump! Here is a dresdenfiles kink meme fill I de-anoned on already, so might as well post it here:

( Margaret Dresden and Leanansidhe being hot, and a discussion of art and technique. )

I am now almost halfway through Dresden Files canon. And almost halfway through dueSouth canon, which partly explains why DF is taking so long.

And, OMG: the RayK episodes: that is nearly up to Boston Legal levels of slashy. I mean, I know the dS ptb had admitted to playing up on purpose by that point, but !!!! (And hey now they can even get civil-unioned too!)

Also, I watched Call of the Wild, so now I have written my official, obligatory post-CotW dogsledding fic. It has the Winter Lady and her court in it, but you don't really need to know Dresden Files for this, as long as you buy that RayK could go meet a fairy queen in Chicago's undercity.

Title: One Warm Line
Summary: Ray Kowalski meets the Winter Lady. And the Winter Lady meets Ray Kowalski.
Notes: If other people don't write more dS/DF crossover I shall still be forced to keep doing it myself. (This is now my first official series on AO3, omg.) ~4000 words, post-CotW for Rayk, early in her canon timeline for Maeve, nothing that needs warning for. Also, yes, you still have to completely ignore relative timelines to make this work; just pretend some fair folk got their hands on it? ETA: This story hits 37 of my 101 fic kinks. In less than 5,000 words. Um, \o/?
AO3 link: One Warm Line

( Maeve, of course, knew about the mortal policeman as soon as he started poking around the edges of the Undercity. )

1. Ebook piracy: the latest hot topic. I have been staying out of this discussion, mostly because: I have been listening to pirated audiobooks since before I could *read*, since pirated audiobooks meant "check the LP out of the library and copy it on to reel-to-reel tape." I worked through all my moral and ethical questions about the issue by the time I had hit kindergarten, with the assistance of the fact that *all* of my peers and authority figures did the same things; I had picture books that were photostat copies bound with brads; I had Boxcar Children books that were bookstore remainders with the covers stripped.

My father was a math and programming teacher in the early 80s; the county-wide department inservice days were the best thing ever, because Dad would come home with 5.25-inch discs holding pirated copies of all the latest Apple II games that all the teachers were trading around under the desks. (True story: I once asked Dad what the "kracker" did in programming, since all the programs we had at home had a "kracked by" credit before the opening screen.) In fact, I have never met a single teacher, at any level, and growing up a TK I've met a lot, who has taught for more than five years and doesn't routinely make illegal copies of things for her classes. When a law is that widely flouted (by pretty much everyone who doesn't directly benefit from its existence, and also often, quietly, by them as well), what you need to do is change the law, not human nature.

Which is to say, I got over this topic two decades ago. Can we move on and stop acting like fainting flowers about it? ^_~

2. Still listening to (pirated) Dresden Files! 3.5 books in have reached Step 10 in the getting-into-a-fandom timeline. Current fic bunnies: A Day In the Life of Father Forthill; 5 Times Harry Dresden Narrowly Avoided Learning About Slash; and Ray Kowalski Dances With The Winter Lady. Also did another meme fill, which was probably obvious to anyone who knows me and is reading over there. However, I've reached the point where I know just enough canon that I no longer feel comfortable writing fic without knowing it all, sigh, so that's stalled, mostly.

Luckily, the anon meme is keeping me in fic for now! Actually I was just thinking that maybe Dresden Files has finally cured me of politics RPF, given the relative numbers of times I've been reloading the two memes, but then Dresden Files fandom decided on its own to adopt Rahm Emanuel as a character, so I suspect I'm just cursed to read politics RPF forever. (Oh, Rahm, oh.)

3. I am almost finished with my mending basket! Which means time to start a brand-new sewing project, maybe! (Or go back to a years-old retired one.) The last thing in the basket was the Madelyn Mack dress I wore at con-txt and ripped the hem out of. It's 100-year-old black silk, so thin it's translucent in sunlight. I have a picture of my grandmother wearing it, c. 1930, in an "Old Hometown" history pageant; I have a picture of her grandmother wearing what might be the same dress, 30 years earlier. I was really, really nervous about attempting to repair a dress that's practically an artifact and such fragile fabric, too - until I actually started the repair.

I am at *least* the fifth person who has attempted to repair the hem of this dress! (And a better seamstress than at least two of them.) That makes me feel a lot better, and, somehow, love the dress a lot more, too. In fact, its value as a historical artifact may not so much be its value as a dress, as it is a record of Edwardian and early-20th-century home clothing repair techniques; this dress wears its scars proudly, and I'm learning things about effective and efficient repair just from studying it that even my mother's generation seems to have forgotten. (I never did get a picture of me wearing it last summer. Maybe once the repair is done I'll attempt a photographic record. Repair being done make take awhile - there is literally six yards of hem around this skirt.)

4. Last Thursday was the first 10 O'clock Live! It was not terrible! It could use some settling-in time, but it was legitimately good. It actually feels like it's kind of halfway between wanting to be the Daily Show and wanting to be something more like W$W - a serious but irreverent real current events magazine. Am looking forward to more.

...and then the next day Keith Olbermann signed off for the last time. D: D: He wasn't always right and he wasn't always good, but he almost always said the things that the American left needed said but was afraid to, and shouted them when they needed shouted, and now who's to do that?

5. I joined inkitout - the DW community to challenge yourself to keep writing all year - and so far, thanks to Dresden Files, am doing okay. But! This week's support post was to introduce one of your characters, and I was like hooray! I always want to talk about my original characters! Until I tried, and realized I couldn't do it. ( original character wibbling )

OMG, this was clearly the right time to get into Dresden Files fandom, it seems like everywhere I go there is somebody who is just getting into it or starting something new.

Look, there's even a Dresden Files anon meme as of, um, yesterday! And just when I finally got caught up on the politics one. And I offer free whuffie to anyone who can guess which fill I wrote! Not for which prompts are mine, though, because they're probably painfully obvious.

There are way more I want to fill, but I am hampered by being less than 1/4 of the way through the canon, on a lot of them. I am so tempted to skip to the end. But. I think I have just realized something about myself: Audiobooks are the *ideal* way for me to consume any fandom that I'm writing fic in. They take a lot longer for me to get through, but it's worth it. Because when I'm writing fic for a non-text-based fandom, the stories don't unspool in my head as text - I'm thinking in terms of camera angles or panel layouts instead of phrases and paragraphs, and it gets difficult to translate onto the page, especially if the story needs a close POV. But one thing I need in order to really feel good about my characterization is a strong sense of voice, being able to hear the intonations and accents of the characters when I put their words on the page, and I don't get that when the canon I'm working from is just text.

Good audiobooks combine the diction and structure of text with the strong voices of TV, and it's actually working for me. And I'm remembering that the first fandom I did a really steady amount of fic in, HP, was a fandom where I knew the audiobooks better than the paper books by the end, too. So right now I'm rationing out the Dresden audiobooks by forcing myself to put in 1000 words on fic on write-or-die immediately after every hour I listen. So far, it's kind of working. (The fic is blatant id-spill so far - I am currently whacking it hard with a stick in hopes of stopping the mpreg - but at least it's *progressing*.)

Also I am finally getting my quilt repairs done. ^_^

Anyway. While I was off being all proud of that, my sister went and wrote over 7,000 words of AMAZING and AWESOME Q/Captain Jack Harkness crossover slash, which is brilliant and which you all should read:

Qniversal Constants by stellar_dust.


Also, poall in last entry is still open. Please vote! I meant it about not caring if you knew the fandom or had any intention of reading it.

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.

They say that the first fic you write in the New Year will be an omen for the rest of your writing that year.

..if that's the case, the new year will be interesting. And full of id.

I don't even know. I really don't know. I can't believe I'm posting crossover fic between two fandoms where I don't know the relevant canon for either. And yet I am.

Title: Inconvenient Spirits
Summary: The Bookman and Gentleman Johnny meet in person at last. And Raymond Vecchio has the start of a very bad day.
Notes: I have not read any Dresden Files! And I have only watched S1 of dueSouth! ... I've read a lot of fic though! And honestly! Why is there not more Dresden/dS crossover fic? Why? If other people don't write some I shall be forced to keep doing it myself. ~2000 words, in-character language of varying offensiveness, not much else. Also, you have to completely ignore relative timelines to make this work; just pretend some fair folk got their hands on it?
( You need to get that paranoia looked at, Marcone. Supernatural influences? Seriously? )

I was going to save this to post after I had done some of the other things I am supposed to be doing (finishing up yuletide, making those two recs posts I owe people, answering comments, etc and so on) but it is becoming increasingly clear that I need to post this now so that I can at least attempt explain why those other things aren't getting done.

So, here it is:

How melannen Gets Into A New Fandom

( A Case Study using The Dresden Files )