He is Duncan MacLeod, the Highlander. Born in 1592 in the Highlands of Scotland and he is still alive. He is immortal. For 400 years he's been a warrior, a lover, a wanderer, constantly facing other immortals in a combat to the death. The winner takes his enemy's head and with it his power. I am a Watcher, part of a secret society of men and women who observe and record, but never interfere. We know the truth about immortals. In the end, there can be only one. May it be Duncan MacLeod, the Highlander.

That's it, that's all the show knowledge you need! That's all the average episode assumed you would know, anyway.

Except you need to know about Methos too. Methos is the World's Oldest Immortal (tm). He is mostly interested in being left alone and being a troll, in that order. People shipped him a lot with Duncan MacLeod, for fairly obvious onscreen reasons. The fic often had a massive dose of enemyslash to it, for slightly more complicated reasons. (Okay, the average Methos episode did have the format of 'Methos and MacLeod are the best of friends, they get into a spat about ethics, somebody else loses their head, Methos and MacLeod make up over murder', and there was the two-parter where MacLeod went evil and Methos had to save him, and the two-parter where Methos went evil and MacLeod had to save him, but other than that, honestly! they generally get on fairly well. As much as Immortals can, in a world where all Immortals more-or-less believe that they are trapped in a winner-take-all battle royale with each other.)

But a lot of the Methos/Mac fic went all in on the "Mac and Methos don't trust each other" in a way that felt really off-model when I actually watched the show? (And I have watched the whole show! It holds up better than, frankly, it has any right to.)

The real interesting enemies/lovers/friends dynamic here is with the Watchers. Joe is a Watcher. The Watchers are sworn never to interfere in Immortals' affairs, but they are also being slowly taken over, interally, by a faction that wants to murder Immortals for their own ends, and Joe has to constantly battle his love for his Immortal friends with his loyalty to the Watchers. Meanwhile. Methos has been living undercover as a mortal Watcher under the name Adam Pierson, and is happy to juggle his two opposing identities of Immortal and Watcher as long as he can get away with it. There is some really interesting complicated stuff there. (Also I ship it. A lot. And Joe is one of my favorite characters, ever.)

I feel like I'm not going to do justice to this recs set though because Highlander fandom isn't one that moved wholesale to AO3, and what is up there is mostly by still-very-active authors I've used in other fandoms, and huge swathes of the old fandom have just disappeared, and I never kept good enough records because Highlander fandom just seemed like it would always be there for me, waiting. But here are three good stories that deal with Watcher and Immortal conflicts of loyalty.

• Shades and Echoes (28308 words) by auberus
  Chapters: 19/?
  Fandom: Highlander: The Series
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Hints of slash - Relationship
  Characters: Methos, Duncan MacLeod, Connor MacLeod, Joe Dawson, Amanda Darieux, Hugh Fitzcairn, Don Salzer, Darius
  Additional Tags: AU
  Summary:

  In which Duncan meets Adam Pierson a little earlier than he did in canon, and promptly takes the 'new' Immortal under his wing.




• Immortal Haven (29506 words) by jtt
  Chapters: 6/6
  Fandom: Highlander: The Series, Highlander - All Media Types
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Characters: Methos, Joe Dawson, Immortals and Watchers, Amy Brennan-Thomas
  Additional Tags: Methos' past, advanced ancient cultures, Immortals as valuable members of society, Amy Zoll, Timothy Wyatt, Let's go spelunking people, Methos exposed as Methos to Watchers previous to this story, Methos' early years, Watchers, get their comeuppance, Identity Reveal
  Summary:

  The Watchers know who Methos is now, but as Joe warned them - they can't Watch someone they can't find. Finally, Methos is spotted at an archeology site... a 5,000 year old cave settlement to be exact. Set in 2000, but before the Endgame movie.




• Worth Having (3171 words) by Maygra
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Highlander: The Series
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Characters: Joe Dawson, Methos, Methos/Joe implied
  Additional Tags: Gen or Pre-Slash, Community: Sweet Charity, 2008
  

I will confess: I almost didn't include this in the list, because I haven't really read very much of the fic compared to other fandoms I've covered. I also haven't seen the canon but that at least is par for the course! The main enemies to lovers pairing is Joe/Nicky, the two immortal soldiers who met across a battlefield, and killed each other over and over until they realized killing wasn't working and they should try something else.

This should be my thing? But by the time Joe and Nicky are in the present, they've been an established relationship for almost a thousand years. So the fandom seems to come in basically three forms: Established relationship that barely touches on enemies to lovers; historical settings that people in the fandom constantly argue about the historical/canonical accuracy of; and setting-swap AUs; and while I enjoyed a lot of it none of them dragged me in super hard? And when I do try to look into the fandom beyond just reading fic that I see rec'd, I find myself way more interested in Andy and Nile and Quynh and Booker and Copley than Joe and Nicky, idk. (This is a problem I have a lot with popular slash pairings but it doesn't usually come into play until I actually watch canon.) (But also I was very much on a psych downswing when this fandom was at its height last year, I'm sure that's part of it.)

But I decided I had to keep it on the list. First, because it did make such a mark on fandom when the movie came out, and because so many authors I recognized from other enemies-to-lovers fandoms write a lot of good fic for it. (Unfortunately that means most of what I would have rec'd is authors I want to save for other fandoms.)

Also though I am including this because it occurred to me that this would be an excuse for me to talk about how much I now want a fic where Joe and Nicky cross over with my other North African/Italian pair who met across a battlefield. Perhaps Nile starts noticing things in their stories about how they met that don't quite line up and they finally admit that they were using the Crusade as their history when they met Andy because it was the culturally available story at the time, and after she assumed they were newbies it just seemed awkward to confess they were actually over a thousand years old. Perhaps they just ran into a pair of very old soldiers who were very in love who happened to share homelands with them a thousand years apart, and got mentored for awhile! I am not picky. You all know my weakness for crossovers. This is the kind of alignment that begs for one. (Also I just want Hannibal and Scipio to run away together and be immortal and in love for a thousand years completely separate from the Old Guard, obvs., it's just a convenient excuse.)

Unfortunately that story does not exist, so here is a Booker/Copley rec instead. Booker/Copley is enough of a rarepair that I feel *slightly* more able to rec for it. They have a complicated enemies-but-allies-but-enemies-but-allies thing that I'm not sure I can explain with any accuracy but I definitely enjoy!

• with our lives our love restore (8413 words) by Siria
  Fandom: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/James Copley
  Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence
  Summary:

  Copley didn't worry, exactly, but he did draw up a couple of contingency plans, just in case. None of those plans involved Booker showing up on his doorstep one Tuesday morning.

Hello, Purim gifter!

Sorry this is a little bit late; I made up my mind to sign up at the very last minute and didn't have a chance to write until now.

I would love anything about any female character, or Jewish character, or person being persecuted by evil viziers, in any of the fandoms I requested. I don't have any particular DNWs for any of these, and I love the kind of silly and/or fluffy fic that Purimgifts is good for, but I would also be okay with something that went dark (as long as it's appropriate for Purimgifts in general, of course - nothing along the lines of the bad fandom example in the faq.) I listed my top rating as mature because I didn't want you to feel pressured but anything at any rating is fine if that's what calls to you.

I'm okay with basically any ships in any of these fandoms, but please don't break up any ongoing canon ships to get there (turning canon ships poly is ok though.)

I requested a bunch of SF/Fantasy-ish fandoms that have very little canon Jewish content, but for any of them, I would love any AU or OC or worldbuilding-based stuff that looks at what it's like to be Jewish in that universe, and I also love everybody-is-Jewish AUS. (Or anything expanding on the Judaism canon there is, for the ones that have some.) I have some ideas (that I have been saving up every year I considered doing Purimgifts) below, but I am not Jewish, so some of them are probably Wrong, and feel free to ignore them and write me something else entirely.

I only requested fandoms where I could think of things I wanted for women OR evil viziers OR Jewish characters, so there's a lot under here, but feel free to ignore it all if that helps.

( Discworld )
( Good Omens )
( Highlander )
( Imperial Radch )
( Rivers of London )
( Star Trek:TOS )
( Star Wars )
( Thor movies )
( Wonder Woman )

OKAY HERE IS THE NEXT ONE ENJOY (??)

( In which nobody dies (at least not for very long) and I abandon all concerns with narrative plausibility )

This wins the award for "One I Am Most Likely To Play With More". Only I'd have to read the book first, and then I would probably decide that all of my characterization here is wrong, and anyway I'm now only interested in [minor character who doesn't even have an AO3 tag yet] [or even worse, Marius]. Anyway, here are some other things that happen in this 'verse:

( Nobody is still dead and plausibility is still somewhere far over the horizon )

The other problem with writing more of this is that trying to give canon, and what it has to say about death and duty, the respect and thought it deserves, while also magically bringing everyone back to life, would take, oh, at last report, several hundred thousand words. And I'd have to do it while writing well-researched 1830s France and Enlightenment philosophy. I have other things to do with the next ten years of my life.

I hope.

Okay, you guys said this counted as a fic, so I bribed myself to finish and post it. (Don't worry, though, I don't actually expect you to read it just because you said I should post it! It is still an incredibly self-indulgent story.)

Title: Storytelling & Blood
Fandom: Diane Duane's Young Wizards & Highlander:The Series
Length: ~4,000 words.
Summary: Ahriman is an avatar of the Lone Power. Richie Ryan is a young wizard on Ordeal. Methos is all too familiar with how that story ends.

Notes: This story is basically a re-interpretation of the end of the Highlander: The Series episode "Archangel" re-cast through the lens of the cosmology of "Young Wizards", and focusing on Methos and Joe, mostly because I like it a lot more that way. It contains a small amount of verbatim dialogue, and, yes, the canon character death from that episode.
( Notes on the crossover )

****

( Methos was finding it difficult to look at Richie Ryan across the cafe table.  )

So, I went back and looked, and the first time I talked about wanting to write this story was July, 2007, but I had clearly been pondering it for some time before that, which kind of gives me hope about all the other stories I've been meaning to write for years and years and years. (Also, I'm still not sure about some of the plot questions in that old entry! Feel free to offer your opinions.)

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.

(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.)

In the department of "stories I am not writing right now, no really, but I wish someone would":

Major Klaus von dem Eberbach of NATO and his pet art thief/consultant/not-actually-my-boyfriend Eroica are set on a case that involves. Hmmm. I think some modern artist from [pick a country] is discovered to have been encoding highly dangerous security secrets in the brushstrokes of his paintings in order to get them out of the country. The paintings are in several high-profile museums and collections, and Klaus and Eroica have to get the paintings out of public view without alerting anyone (including the owners) to the fact that NATO is involved, in case somebody else twigs the secret.

Eroica points out that to do the job right, they need to replace the paintings with forgeries (that don't include the encoded information.) Klaus says "can't you do it?" and Eroica replies, "You flatter me, darling, but I'm out of practice. And I was never quite that good. Or that fast."

"If you can't--"

"Patience, my darling. I know several people who could do the job. As for people who could do the job and would be willing to do it for NATO, and NATO would be willing to hire--" He looks up at Klaus through his eyelashes. "We're going to have to go to New York."

( Read more... )

....and then they done crime, the end.

1. I am back from Pennsic War! I survived!

2. The mosquito problem back home is completely unacceptable. I just spent two weeks living basically entirely out-of-doors, wearing as much or (given the heat, more often) as little clothing as I felt like, and got 0 bug bites. Within five minutes of opening the car door upon getting home, I had 12. (And for me, mosquito bites are a large welt and >10 days of itching. yaye.) I hadn't realized just how much I'm held hostage by the little suckers until I actually lived somewhere in which I wasn't.

3. Much like before, I am having difficulty believing Pennsic War actually exists now that I'm not there any more. Surely the whole idea that such a thing might actually happen is ludicrous.

4. I have brought back with me one mysterious rash, a significant quantity of mud and ants, way too much sewing/fiber arts stuff, a vague idea that I might actually join the SCA this year, the burning desire to immediately go camping again (somewhere with no mosquitoes), a book of camp recipes that came out unexpectedly yummy, zero photographs and 281 mb of audio recordings. (Mostly of ambient/background noise, because the ambiance, the immersion, is part of what makes Pennsic ... what it is, and I feel like static photos can't capture that, so I thought I'd try sound. Also, I've still been listening to too many BBC Radio documentaries. We shall see if I ever get around to editing it into something reasonably short and shareable.)

5. I went two weeks without internet! And loved it! But now I am caught up on my internet stuff...up to, um, Sunday before last. With the help of DW's ability to read your flist by date, which is amazingly awesome but still so poorly documented that I still have to search the newsblog every time I want to remember how to do it.

6. There was another fic writer in my camp! (Well, let's be realistic - probably more than one, but she was the only one I talked about it with.) Only I completely failed to get her LJ name. Oops. I wonder if I can remember her fandoms well enough to find her anyway?

7. I have signed up for remixduello! And you should too! It is the remix challenge for people who don't have the fannish attention span to qualify for remix proper - you pick which of your stories gets remixed, and your assigned remixer has to do that one. It still has to be a story in one of a short list of large Western media fandoms, but you only have to have written one story like that in your entire career to qualify!

(crossovers still don't count, though. I would qualify so hard for a crossover remix. I dream of one day having it together enough to run a crossover remix challenge. Everybody would put in a list of all the fandoms they can write, and then get assigned a story to remix that contained some subset of fandoms in that list.)

8. I just made myself a linkedin account. I kind of hate myself for it, but apparently some employers want that these days? And in general they want to be able to turn up *something* about you with a web search - "I'm security-conscious and responsible enough to keep my online activities separate from my professional life" apparently doesn't cut it anymore. (ATM the only result for my legal name and town is my Save The Internet testimonial - which is not the worst thing for potential employers to find, I guess, aside from the embarrassing uneditable typos in the first paragraph.)

9. Please tell me someone has written the fanfic where Highlander characters are active SCA members (or regional equivalent)? I've seen fic where they use medieval reenacting as an excuse for carrying swords/duelling/etc., but not where they actually participated. Surely Methos would make an effort to develop a real cover by actually joining and going to events! And Amanda would just think it was all adorable.

10. The thing that is hardest to get used to after my longest-ever camping trip (aside from the mosquitoes)? Artificial lighting and lack of natural light. Yeah, we had a battery-powered lantern and there was some on-sight lighting, but it was always really clear you were surrounded by the dark, and 90% of it was fire. When I go off artificial light (or at least go for red-spectrum, dim as possible lights), I always sleep better and more consistently, am generally happier, eat better and feel better. I should make a greater effort to do that.

So I have been trying not to get to emotionally involved with the politics (though I still want to do that "Sarah Palin or TGP: Who Is More Qualified?" point-by-point comparison), but I have been following fivethirtyeight.com pretty closely. And OMG, if Obama takes the South? That will be not only win, it'll be the most important thing to happen in American politics in my *lifetime*.

***
Anyway.
1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your blog.

stellar_dust gave me "D".
...I had a list of twenty-five characters to pick from, and that was before I checked my notes. So, um, have the short list as meme x 3.

And hey, while I'm at it, why not give me two numbers between 1 and 15 and I'll write you a comment-fic where those two characters meet. :D (Random or calculated, I don't even care.)

( Five Large Fandoms )

( Five Small Fandoms )

( Five Nonexistent Fandoms )

...Yeah, I should probably stop there. Even if it means I have to leave out David Starr, and Mike Doonesbury, and Dick and Dorothea (the D's), and Diana Fowley, and Dick Grayson**, and Dickon Sowerby**, and Daystar, and Death**, and Doli the Dwarf, and ....

(** marks characters I have either written in fic or tried to write.)

Some thoughts about Dr. Who:

1. Jack Harkness has stated that he used to spend a lot of time in Pompeii, in the days right before its destruction, doing his Galactic Con Man bit. That means, in Pompeii, in the days right before the volcano went off, there was a) Captain Jack Harkness (possibly several times over) and b) various time agents Captain Jack Harkness was swindling. Which begs several questions: Shouldn't one of the above have *noticed* the alien influence all over the bloody place? In that case, was whole thing in fact actually the unintended consequence of Jack's meddling? And given that the Doctor knew Jack had been there, why did the TARDIS end up in that particular time and place anyway, hmmm?

2. I've been re-reading "The Tale of the Five" by Diane Duane ('cause there are a few bits of it I don't have memorized yet) and Hasai's story is really making me think about the Doctor. Hasai, see, is a member of a long-lived, space-faring race that has a... complicated relationship with linear time, ( and spoiler cut ) But I really, really want to read fic that sees the Doctor's timeline through the lens of what happened to Hasai.

Actually, I really just want to see fic where the Doctor and Hasai hang out and comisserate. And all the Doctor's mdeihei get to come out, too. :D "Tale of the Five" is tangentially part of Young Wizards canon, and so is Dr. Who, so by the Transitive Law of Tommy Westphall, they are part of the same universe; I ought to be able to get them to meet; I just can't figure out *how*.

3. Speaking of crossovers, Jamie MacCrimmon is awesome. He also happens to be from a clan closely associated with the MacLeods, and fought for the Jacobites at Culloden despite the leadership of the MacLeods being Hanoverian.

Duncan MacLeod and Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod also fought for the Jacobites at Culloden.

All of the above were presumed dead after the battle, but later turned up in rather suprising times and places.

Incidentally, Highlander and Dr. Who are the two most crossovered fandoms *ever*, and mesh seamlessly.

SO WHY HAS NOBODY WRITTEN THE STORY WHERE MAC RUNS INTO JAMIE, in, say, the 28th century in a mall on Titan, while they're both on secret missions, and they get roaring drunk reminiscing together and then save the universe (while Two and Methos get bored and wander off to take naps)? THIS IS A TRAVESTY AND FAILURE OF THE INTERNETS. INTERNETS, YOU HAVE FAILED ME.

I know nobody on this flist cares, but I have to say: Watching the Highlander Horsemen arc while you're still in the headspace where Mac is an Abdal and Methos is a (very, very bitter and screwed up) avatar of the Lone Power? Just makes it *that much better*. (I think Kronos is actually some kind of Dark Aspect of the Champion. For several reasons, but it doesn't really get confusing 'till Ahriman shows up, and I haven't re-watched Archangel yet, so.)

(What? I just read some really good HL/TW crossovers, and they made a Highlander joke on the Daily Show, f'god's sake. The video was just sitting there saying "watch me! Watch the HL episodes you've seen nine times already, not the DVDs your sister ordered you to watch!" -- I blame it on the blahs, which have settled down from "feeling icky" to "head cold", which is only better in that now I can at least pin down the symptoms. Highlander is just so ... comfortable that way. You know that whatever happens, there'll be warm sweaters, good food, and people who do love each other and are very good at what they do.)

Anyway, ( cat pictures )

I present to you: the WIPs I currently have in my check-every-day bookmark folder!

State of Grace by Sailor_Ptah (Fake News Fic, character!Stephen/Charlene/Tracey/Jon.) The long-awaited companion story to Expecting, which is of course Daily Show fandom's one and only completely canon-compliant Jon/Stephen mpreg fic. :D Although State of Grace is expected to be somewhat angstier, as it brings in Stephen's (completely canon!) past as a rentboy. :D!!

This is actually basically the least crack-like story on the list, btw, since it's meticulously canonical. Watch the trailers if you don't believe me. And just *try* to not squee while you're doing it. (My glee, it goes on and on. PS: Does anyone have the Billy Joel song State of Grace? I can't find it and it gets stuck in my head every time.)

The Luck of Dennis St. Michel, Vicount Stokington by Captain Thunder, a denizen of Comics Curmudgeon (Newspaper comics, Dennis/Margaret, Dennis/Joey; AU): The sordid tale of the Viscount's return to Menacing Hall upon his expulsion from Oxford; and his discovery that Lady Margaret, still unwed and shrewish at 22, has come into a duchy and fifty thousand pounds a year. :D (There will be many :D faces before I am done with this, I'm sure. And possibly some \o/ . It takes a special brand of joy to keep something in my wips folder. Like, say, Dennis the Menace Regency Romance AUs.)

Readjustment by Seanchai and Elspethdixon (Marvel comics, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark): the sequel to their Reconstruction, Resurrection, and Redemption, the post-Civil War fixit AU in which Captain America comes back from the dead, he and Iron Man realize it was all a misunderstanding, they're in love with each other, and all is right with the world. Well, mostly: the rest of it they're fixing in this sequel. :D And, as a bonus, there's superhero fights and the aftermath of Civil War is actually being *dealt with*. Elspethdixon was the first fic author I really fangirled over back in my Remus/Sirius days, and, well, she still writes the manly angst better than anyone else. She the only person I'll read specifically for the H/C instead of despite it, because it's *just right* and totally true to the characters. And Tony just does manpain so well. Possibly even better than Sirius and Remus. (PS: Her Avengers fic also features background Danny/Luke/Jessica and Jarvis/Aunt May \o/ )

Burntcopper's NaNo project (Jack Harkness/Indiana Jones/(Methos)): She posted about this in little_details, and mentioned that it involved Jack Harkness, Indiana Jones, and Methos teaming up during WWII--

Oh, there are still people reading this review and not over there reading the story already? Why?

Actually, being a NaNo project, it's pretty rough and starts slow, although there's lots of WWII British spying in the beginning, so still worth reading. Indy shows up halfway through and almost immediately finds himself in bed with Captain Jack, though, so that's all right. Methos hasn't appeared yet, but he'd better before November ends. Oh, and there's a really cool plot with a nifty mcguffin. Did I mention the plot? No? Well, how about the Indiana/Captain Jack? ETA: AND NOW THERE IS JENNY!!!

Out Of Bounds, by icarusancalion (SGA, John/Rodney, AU): Okay, this one is basically figure skating porn with John and Rodney in it. I mean, it's excellent, the character work is great, but I have a feeling that the only people who'll get into it are the people who fall in love with men's figure skating at least every few years. (Note to self: must find my ice-skating lessons gift certificate before January.) It kept showing up on my fflist and I kept reading it, so I finally gave in. Mind you, it's long and lush and rich and porny and full of atmosphere and detail like everything Icarus writes; it's also a figure skating AU SGA slash WIP.

PS: Read everything else these authors have written. You don't get on my wips list unless I've loved a bunch of your long-form stories. Or I've never heard of you before and you're gloriously insane. one or the other.

So I was *going* to spend this evening making my big 'back from roadtrip, read DH, ps lj is a bitch" post, but of course LJ went down, so I ended up reading the old!fic recs I had open in another tab instead.

This leads to the existential question:
If I do finally write that fic where Methos gets *really* annoyed about Richie dying on Ordeal, and decides to go give his old friend the Lone Power a good hard talking-to about it, should I set it *before* Deep Wizardry, so that Methos can team up with Ed'rashtekaresket, or *after* High Wizardry, so that Methos can team up with Dairine?

(the Young Wizards timeline is sufficiently ... ineffable ... that I can pretty much have Archangel slot in there wherever I feel like it.)

And should Methos have lost his wizardry long ago as a result of dealings with the Lone Power, or be the *original* Immortal Wizard who was tricked into giving up his Wizardry so that his peoples' Choice was never finished, or be an avatar of the Lone Power like Peach was of the Champion (but spent so much time in Duration that he's, well, *changed*), or have him not have come into his wizardry *yet* because he's only now ending his latency period, or have him be just a Really Old Guy with no wizardry at all who's seen a lot and knows where all the bodies are buried?

I'm tempted to go with the last one, or possibly the first one, because I get tired really fast of all the stories where Methos has Super Saint Glowy Powers, as if he's not special enough *already*. On the other hand, if I pick any of the others, I have a ready-made plot, as opposed to just Methos stomping around, pissing off a lot of wizards, and kicking the Lone Power in the face. :D

(The reason he goes off on his own instead of, y'know, helping MacLeod out with *his* embodiment-of-entropy problem is, of course, that Methos is terrified of accidentally letting slip that Mac is obviously an Abdal - he came too damn close to giving it away once already with that Too Important To Lose crack.)

...or I could just put down the Internets already and go re-read Wizard's Holiday now that I finally have a copy.

Con.txt was great fun! I haven't updated about it yet for two reasons:

The first one is that I came home on Sunday night, got back online, and all over my flist I found ( The Loquacious Duchess of Richmond. ) And that was something completely the opposite of con.txt, and the people at con.txt, in every way, and I didn't want to contaminate my squee. (Why did she have to post it *that* weekend? OMG conspiracy!)

The second reason is the complete Highlander on VHS that I brought home from the swap table at the con. (Well, it was missing a few episodes from Season 3, including the first one with what-his-name, the guy with the big nose), but seriously, NOT COMPLAINING. ( You old-school fangirls rock my socks. ) So I spent most of yesterday, when not engaged in schoolwork, watching videotapes and squeeing quietly to myself.

As for something resembling ( an actual con report ): Con Committee, though I have no standard to judge by, you did an amazing and awesome job as first-timers (and for this first-timer). It all went flawlessly as far as I could see, and I had a really, really great time.

Also, I think I had the weirdest hairdo of anybody at the con, which I was really not expecting, because fangirls=weird in my limited experience. But I forgot how many old-style slash fen are used to working undercover, I guess. Well, anybody who remembers the girl who talked too much in panels and had her hair done up in pirate braids with Canadian pennies in them will know it was me.

I just stuck the fanfic I was working on today onto my necreavit account, while I try to figure out if I'm ready to spread it around at large. It's Batman/Highlander crossover genfic, about 3500 words, and it's a crossover style I've never written before (and rarely seen written at all) - the amalgamverse kind, where nearly everybody is a blend two different characters, one from each of the two fandoms, and the universes' rules and backstory are similarly smushed. I'd really appreciate if anybody who's even passingly familiar with both fandoms would go and tell me if it makes any kind of sense at all.

I may start using necreavit more, by the way, if I don't get moving and fix my laptop's internet; it makes it much easier to write when I'm swapping back and forth between computers.

Um, lessee. Also, I now have all of our YA (not counting the special collections) in LibraryThing - I've been at the downstair computer, which is also where those books are, so hey! Kismet! (1333 and maybe halfway done now.)

Also, I have figured out who my new haircut makes me look like. It is *exactly* the same look as this superheroine's. . . can I cosplay a GLA member with the JLA group? Please? *g*

This is the Highlander The Series / Batman-between-the-crises amalgamverse crossover genfic. About 3500 words and in need of some fact-checking still, but otherwise done. Until I start another section.

( Observe and Record: In Which Timothy Drake is given his first field Watcher assignment, and Adam Pierson has a conversation with Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Broody that doesn't end in drawn swords. Quite. )

This is, like, *completely* uncanonical. To the real history and place, and to any of the three* fictional worlds I'm pulling in. Because that would require a *lot* more research than I've done, and I refuse to take this thing that seriously. Just call it severely AU.

The backstory about Aelfwine is derived from early work on The Book of Lost Tales, btw. That much is real. The origin of the Red Book is a mystery, but it must have shown up around this time, for early work on "The Hobbit".

Yes, it's the start of the ( crossover Tolkien rpf.** )

*Or possibly four, since Reg is apparently actually a Time Lord. But he'll always be a Highlander-style Immortal to me!
**No, it's not slash. Even *I* wouldn't stoop so far as to slash Tolkien! Besides, the only feasible pairing would be Ronald/Jack, and just . . no. Sorry. Get it out of my head! Ah! Now I won't be able to stop thinking about it! it's . . too . . horribly . . plausible . .