There's a thing going around tumblr about posting about "Ten books that have stayed with you in some way over your life", and everybody else was sharing their shame, so I thought I'd join in.

(okay I'm not actually ashamed about any of these, sorry.)

There are many more than ten, but in no particular order, the first ten I thought of:

( Mostly kids' books as one would expect. )

Yuletide Reveals!

I got two stories, both of which were really good:
Five Time Enjorlas Dropped a Barricade On Someone (1594 words) by Bobcatmoran
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Arm Joe, Les Misérables - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Enjorlas (Arm Joe), Ponpon, Police (Arm Joe), Marius (Arm Joe)
Summary:

Dropping barricades from the sky is not a skill that is mastered in just one day, nor is it one to be taken lightly.

ARM JOE FIC WITH AMAZING WORLDBUILDING. Unfortunately this failed at accomplishing the main thing that I was hoping requesting it for yuletide would do - which is to say, sating my mad desire for Arm Joe fic, because this is so PERFECT and WONDERFUL that I now want ALL THE ARM JOE IN THE WORLD even more than I did before because there is hope some of it might be as good as this. I'm not going to rec this at length because really if ARM JOE FIC about ENJORLAS DROPPING BARRICADES with WORLDBUILDING doesn't do it for you than you're probably beyond hope anyway. Thanks, bobcatmoran.


a good song to sing you to sleep (1267 words) by elithewho
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Otzi the Iceman RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Otzi the Iceman
Additional Tags: Religion, Death, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Yew for love, yew for death, yew for the names no one would ever speak.

There were three Ötzi stories in Yuletide this year, and they were all really good (especially the one for me though, of course) - I really recommend reading them all together, because even though they were all for different people and by different people, the Ötzi requests were all basically the same, and they make a really good set. Not to say that the fics themselves were at all the same - one thing that makes reading them together so neat is that they all went in completely different directions, which is what I was hoping would happen if this fandom got fic written!

I really like the one that was for me because, where the other two both tell a fairly straightforward story, extrapolating from the evidence we have to build an answer about how Ötzi came to die on the mountain, my author went in a much less concrete direction, trying to build a picture of Ötzi and his world and more than that, the way Ötzi's worldview shapes his world, without really setting out to answer any questions. It really effective drew me back to the same reactions I had when I was little, reading the first media stuff to come out about Ötzi's discovery, the combination of the creeping horror and the comfortable coziness that are all mixed up together in the story.

I wrote two stories, both of which I really enjoyed writing:

What I Did On My Summer Vacation in "The Bronx" (8432 words) by melannen for waywren
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: PINKWATER Daniel - Works, Alan Mendelsohn the Boy from Mars - Daniel Pinkwater
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alan Mendelsohn/Leonard Neeble
Characters: Alan Mendelsohn, Leonard Neeble
Additional Tags: Mars, Alien Cultural Differences, Pre-Slash, Teenagers, POV First Person, Summer Vacation, Friendship, Bookstores, "The Bronx", Comic Book Collecting, 1970s, documentary fic, grandparentshipping, Post-Canon, fleegix
Summary:

Welcome to another great year at Bat Masterson Junior High School. For your first homework assignment, you will write a two-page composition about what you did on your summer vacation. Some of you may get a chance to share them with all of your classmates! Due Monday.

( Extended Notes for Pinkwater )


Girl Of My Dreams (1051 words) by melannen for stellar_dust
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lil BUB, Dinosaurs (Anthropomorfic)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Lil BUB/Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex
Characters: Lil Bub - Character, Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex
Additional Tags: Dating, Hot Air Balloon, Dinosaurs, theropod paleopathology, Bub Ub Bub, visiting in dreams, Science and Magic, Post-Episode: s01e05
Summary:

Lil BUB and Sue finally go out to dinner. Nobody gets eaten (except some fishes!) GOOD JOB BUB

( Extended notes for BUB )


I haven't had time to read many YT stories - I feel like I've been going nonstop since Thanksgiving and no end in sight - but I did manage to read all the Madness stories over 500 words that were in fandoms I felt like reading, and bookmarked the ones I liked in the yuletide_recs collection, so they are in my bookmarks if you care. Next step is to get caught up on post-YT tag wrangling, so my goal is to read all YT fics in fandoms I wrangle and bookmark-rec in those too. :P By then it'll probably be mid-February.

"Long ago in the future, in the galaxy of Witzbilb, near Tarraxsten, a planet with five moons, on a little planetoid no bigger than a gob of spit in this vast and expanding universe, there was a moment."

"A moment?"

"That's right."

"This is a story about a moment?"

"Absotivlutely."

"A moment, like a moment in time, right?"

"Right. Now to continue, this was a happy little moment that had never done anybody the least harm. This moment, whose name was Dennis, played with the other little moments, romping and gamboling with never a care in the world. Little Dennis never suspected that he would become a moment in history - of course he already had, because this is a story of the future in the tense of the past."

"Would you mind if I went to sleep now?"

"This isn't holding your interest, is it?"

"I'm nodding."

"Okay, how about if I told you the true story about how I became a time tourist?"

"A time tourist? What's that?"

"It really should be space-time-and-the-other - that's the element in which I am a tourist - but time tourist sounds better. It could be a story on TV. 'Borgel the Time Tourist.' 'Borgel the Time Tourist and his Amazing Adventures.' 'The Amazing Adventures of Borgel the Time Tourist.' Welcome to another thrilling episode of 'Borgel, Tourist In Time.' A watch company could sponsor it."

--excerpt from Borgel by Pinkwater, aka possibly the worst thing I could have picked up for light reading after finally watching the Doctor Who anniversary stuffs

So anyway, yes, finally watched the Doctor Who anniversary stuffs. If any of you have a reaction post I absolutely should read, you should tell me about it now. :P Also, ( spoilers )

Hello yuletide people! Sorry this is a bit late - life happened (specifically an election on top of a post-tropical cyclone) so I haven't had much time to sit and think about fandom lately. Hopefully, if you got my request, you've looked back in this tag, and my journal, and have a pretty good idea of what writing for me will involve, but I thought I ought to put up a proper letter anyway!

First, the general stuff: I am not a picky person, I like all kinds of fanfic and all kinds of pairings and moresomes and genres and kinks and experimental narrative styles and all kinds of stories. If it's not something I specifically mentioned as not wanting, I will probably love it! I love crossovers - even if I don't know all the fandoms - so if you're inspired along those lines, go wild - and I enjoy strange AUs, especially for small fandoms, so that would be fine too! The old list of narrative kinks still applies, and while I will probably be throwing out a bunch of ideas and prompts in the rest of this letter, don't feel obligated to use any of them; any story will be great.

As is also traditional, I will probably be away from the internet a lot in the week after reveals; I will try to feedback as soon as I can, but if my initial response is late or overly terse, it's not about your story, it's about my limited connection time, I promise.

Onto specific fandoms! I decided to go for four different media this time: video game, movie, song, book. But don't worry - they're all fairly easy to pick up and none of them have a lot of canon, so if our matched fandom is puzzling you, you're welcome to try one of the others.

( Commander Keen )

( Snarkout Boys )

( Citizen Kane )

( Jonathan Coulton - I'm Your Moon )

Essentially: I am not picky when it comes to yuletide stories.

I just put in my yuletide sign-up just in case my access to power goes patchy! Writer, I don't have a letter written yet; I hope to have one up by the time assignments go out, but if not, it is due to circumstances beyond my control. Looking back through the yuletide tag should give you a pretty good idea of what writing for me is like, though!

( copy of my signup if anyone is curious: Commander Keen, Citizen Kane, I'm Your Moon, Snarkout Boys )

And I ended up with 108 offers. :D

I also went through and figured out how I'm voting, so if anybody wants my opinions on any of the items on the Anne Arundel County MD ballot, you have until I lose power to ask.

...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.

1. Worked the election again. Am very, very glad this was just a boring primary and we had less than 20% turnout, if the general election goes the same way it's going to be a disaster. Vote early, vote often! Just like I did.

2. Did I mention Homestuck fandom is dangerous? At election day set-up I used the word "cull" to mean "kill for incompetence and the good of the gene pool" without even thinking about it twice and confused several people. (Of course the supervisor I was paraphrasing used the words "go to your house and beat you to death" instead, so really I was just trying to be more polite. And that should tell you all you need to know about my election judging experience)

3. I posted a thing tracking the plants that are blooming on my weekly walk to common_nature. Hopefully this will be an ongoing monthly update right through November! I have a spreadsheet and all.(In fact currently I have recreational spreadsheets going for books read, things bought at yard sales, wildflowers seen, records owned, and words written. It's like a festival of spreadsheets!) It's going to get harder as the months go on, though, because I know early spring weeds the best, and also, mosquitoes and poison ivy.

4. princessofgeeks made some posts about nuts and bolts of betaing and different sorts of betas because of my request for behind-the-scenes descriptions of the beta process! It was exactly what I was looking for, and I want more of this type of stuff. (Incidentally, I am slowly trickling my con.txt panel ideas onto the official con.txt website suggestions page, but I think I'm going to put only a few more in, so if there's another one you really want to see go up, speak up! Or submit it yourself, I'm not possessive. :D

3. I've been listening to the Pinkwater Podcast's audiobook of The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror lately. I hadn't re-read it in years (actually, I first encountered it in audiobook form, so maybe that's re-listened) because I had found the plot rather thin and boring, compared to most of the other Pinkwater books I'd read.

I still find the "plot", what there is of it, rather thin. On the other hand, it has hipsters - real hipsters, the kind who hang out at a coffee bar/bakery called the Dharma Buns, have deep thoughts about communism and read bad free verse poetry to each other, rather than being ironically racist on Tumblr. And it has a teenage boy who has conceived of a passion for a girl he barely knows who doesn't like him and insists on pressing his suit even after she repeatedly tells him she isn't interested in him or in boys in general, and this is presented as obviously creepy, possibly dangerous, and reasonably terrifying rather than an epic romance, which there needs to be more of in YA fiction in general. (Come to think of it, maybe we weren't supposed to immediately assume stalker-boy was also the overall villain, and that's why the plot always seemed thin to me? But it's pretty damn obvious.)

Also I had forgotten how very OT3 Rat, Winston and Walter are in this one, and how awesome and hilarious their OT3 dynamic is. When I was walking home today I dreamed up a futurefic story for them wherein ( they're all in their late twenties or so, and Walter and Winston are still renting the house near Blueberry park that they moved into after college )

Also, Rat ⋄ Dirk "Bro" Strider. Somebody get on that.

I want to post but I am all full of yuletide! And I can't talk about yuletide! yar.

So instead you will have to make do with a post that acknowledges the existence of Christmas. Sorry.

***

Next, here is my Christmas wishlist, mostly for RL people who sometimes read this journal:( ten things )

****

Meanwhile, there was a list of things I promised myself I could do if I won NaNo this year (which I did! sort of! after ten years of trying!), and since the Scrivener winners' discount still isn't up, I'm going to have to settle for another one:

I would like for Dreamwidth to have a community called showandtell which is exactly what it sounds like: a place where people can make entries to show off that really interesting thing they own! And talk about it! And have people ooh and ah about it! Because I don't know about you, but there is a lot of interesting old junk crammed in this house that I would love to have some justification for continuing to hold on to. :P I'm visualizing that we could assign people weeks to post but have it also open to anyone who wants to post, kind of the way poetry works.

So would anybody else be interesting in taking part in a community like that? I don't want to make it if I'm the only one...

The following is the sort of thing I would visualize as belonging there, plus if I started a comm I wouldn't have to post this sort of thing here :P

( Meet my Angstbunny! )

***

There's a yuletide write-in at a Teaism in downtown DC this Friday which I am very seriously considering, because I haven't been to a local fannish meetup in ages (synecdochic has been very carefully cancelling every one of hers that I might be able to get to :P) and if I went I could, I dunno, TALK ABOUT MY YULETIDE. Also it's quite near the National Geographic Museum and I do kind of want to go to the Staffordshire Hoard exhibit while it's there, so I could go in earlier and do that before tea... and I could even drop by the local Occupy encampment, which is also within a couple of blocks. Anybody else thinking of doing any of those things?

***

And finally, here are some Yuletide-ish icon bases that I made for sharing last year and never posted, some of them from a very old greeting card and some of them from Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars book covers, and also one of the giant chicken of Hoboken (you can probably figure out which are which):

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 )

Signed up for yuletide yesterday! Wow, that was an hour and a half of hell. I ended up offering a lot fewer fandoms than I was going to, just because waiting two minutes for the autocomplete gets really tedious after about fifty fandoms. (I know I could have tried copy/paste, but considering they weren't really clear on how to do it in the first place - the only way to get the instructions is a video with no transcript, really, yuletide, really? - I didn't want to take the risk of doing that and having it come out wrong and having to start over.)

On the upside, you can now edit your signup without having to start over! So I might add some back if they come up needy. And the if summary page ever starts working again. 6_6 I have to say, it is hard to imagine that the old site could have been more broken than this... Also, this really pointed out that there's something seriously borken about AO3's autocomplete. I mean, not just it being slow, the ways in which it responded to being slow made it clear that the thing is not very smart compared to every other autocomplete I've used, which is probably part of why it's slow. Surely they didn't have to program the thing from scratch?

I suppose I should write my dear yuletide letter already. And update my journal tags, since I linked to the tags instead of a placeholder post in my sign-up. In the meantime, though, I went and tortured the AO3 more by uploading two other recent fest fics I've done:

Title: All We Know
Author: melannen
Prompt: Leonard Neeble walks into a bar and meets ... Jeremy Clarkson!
Fandoms: Top Gear UK, Daniel Pinkwaterverse (Alan Mendelsohn the Boy From Mars)
Word Count: 3200
Content Notes: G, gen with background pairing. Possibly contains spoilers for recent events involving the Stig.
Summary:Apparently being married to the Deputy High Commissioner for Extra-Martian Transport means, like it or not, that Leonard is the go-to guy for all the assorted fugitives, refugees, entrepreneurs, castaways, and very lost tourists that wind up stranded on Earth.

Read at All We Know at intoabar
Read at All We Know at AO3


Title:Within, Enemy (The Breathe Through Me remix)
Author:Melannen
Remix of: Within Enemy by astrogirl
Characters:Ainley!Master, Four, Tremas, with Doctor/Master and Doctor/Tremas heavily implied
Categories: PG-ish, slashy gen, 1100 words
Notes: This story is about the Master, and what he did with Tremas's body, so while there is no sexual content in it, there is, sort of inherently, severe violation of bodily autonomy.
Summary:This is what happened, the time the Master tried to steal himself a body, the time it actually worked.

Read Within Enemy at doctor-and-master with bonus meta
Read Within Enemy at AO3


One thing that crossposting those to communities pointed out to me was that the one thing that makes AO3 home to me, above all, is that AO3 takes everything. AO3 lets you design your own categories, and choose how to use theirs. Every time I post fic somewhere other than AO3, I have to spend precious cycles trying to figure out how to label it.

( Ramble about labels and categories and communities )

( Ramble about writing in small fandoms when it isn't yuletide season. )

Anyway, the other interesting thing I noticed in doing the crossposting: I treat DW communities much differently from LJ ones. In that I'm much more comfortable posting to them. Maybe because, for some reason, I feel a greater sense of ownership of them here? I dunno, but I'm not the only one - intobar had an lj and a dw mirror, and looking down the masterlist, on the lj side, 29 out of 40 people chose to post to a personal journal rather than an external archive or directly to the community. On the DW side, only 9 out of 38 did. Which is an interesting commentary on the perception that DW is all about personal journals.

...which immediately brings up the question of whether I want to repeat last year's statistical analysis of yuletide letter hosts. Hmm. Have a while to decide, anyway.
29/40

1. I posted a tutorial on how to set up an OpenID account on Journalfen to getting_started, so if anyone has JF comments importd here that they'd like to eventually claim, they should mark it. (metafandom is still linking to the draft version of the tutorial, but hopefully that will change.)

/me officially washes her hands of S2 forever.

2. /me has sauntered vaugely downward into the #dw irc channel. Curse you, Opera, why did you make that so easy?

If previous experience with IRC stands, I will stay in channel for about a week, and then get behind and never go back. But hEll bot is adorable.

3. damned_colonial posted this meme:
Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so others can play along.
...and I told myself that the next time somebody I read posted it, I would do it. So:
( local politics, regional soft drinks, spike jones, the primordial ass, crossovers, fleegix, and oracular pigs )

PS: Is anyone else getting an occasionally-recurring error when they try to preview from the web interface? I keep getting: [Error: Can't call method "imgtag" on unblessed reference at '/home/dw/current/htdocs/preview/entry.bml' line 106. @ dfw-web02]

Unblessed indeed, DW. Unblessed indeed.

So we've spent the last hour eating raisin toast and alternating between watching the Mythbusters MacGuyver special and watching the red dragon eat the moon.

Now I really, really want a Mythbusters/Reynard Noir crossover. :D

..thought I should actually throw some fanwork up here. I've been working on my inking skillz lately, and tonight at inking practice I was actually on a roll (for me) so I let myself ink something from my old sketchbook for last. It's amazing how much even an amateurish inking job can do for a crappy old drawing. :D

So this is supposed to be my two favorite Pinkwater characters, Rat from the Snarkout Boys and Alan Mendelsohn from Alan Mendelsohn. (I'm ... kind of a fan of his work. Kind of a lot.)

( Read more... )

I now own my very own copy of The Hoboken Chicken Emergency! I am so happy that I could ... well, do something appropriately Pinkwaterian, like spending the whole day wearing deelyboppers and then denying it if somebody asks why.

It's a lovely old yellowed Scholastic paperback, too. I am aware of the ugly omnibus reissues they've been putting out over the last few years - but Pinkwater books should not be bought in a Barnes&Noble; they should be found, after much effort, in a creepy, dusty, used bookstore, or a box in the attic, or the hidden back room of a thrift store; or perhaps picked out of a sale bin at an overly-bright discount store in a completely generic strip mall - the sort of places where Pinkwater characters hang out.

(Pinkwater is like the converse of the ideal Bobbsey Twins childhood - his world is screwed up, fundamentally idiotic, illogical, full of shades of gray, and occasionally just plain mean, but like his characters, you love it anyway because it's yours. It would slot right in with Gaiman's Neverwhere, or with The Cucumber King.)

I also bought a Coville novel that I read ages ago at the library but never owned, and The Space Eagle: Operation Doomsday, because it looked fun and the deal was 3/$1. It seems to be a tie-in novel to ... something, but neither Google nor I have any idea *what*. I suppose I should read it and find out. *g*

And speaking of loving a place because it's yours, I spent the morning at the Kuethe Library in Glen Burnie with the excuse that I was researching for a paper. They still use a card catalog! I fell in love the minute I saw the lovely old cabinet standing there, and that was *before* I got to spend three hours going through filing cabinets full of newspaper clipping. Ah, it was wonderful. Not a computer in the entire building, just shelves and shelves of books and drawers and drawers of paper. All you have to do is point me at a library and wind me up, and I keep going and going and going...

Of course, they didn't have a lot of what I was hoping they'd have, but that just gives me an excuse to get up and finally go explore all the other tiny local libraries and museums and historical societies, right? Not to mention pulling out everything that's stuffed up to the rafters in this house. (No, literally - the plat I need to find this evening is, I believe, stuffed up under a rafter in the attic. I wonder how you cite that in APA style? *g*) And the minute we get a nice Saturday, an excuse to go exploring through the woods with a notebook and a camera and an archealogical outlook. This should be *fun*. (Plus, once the paper's written, the people at the Kuethe Library want a copy for their files. The people at the Odenton Heritage society probably will too. wheee.)

It's so nice to finally have a paper topic that fills me with joy rather than 'eh, okay.' Even if I'm still procrastinating like mad on it whenever I get a chance.