Consonants and vowels all together, equally

This year, 73 stories in 38 fandoms, including the fandom I both wrote in and got fic for, Vertigo (Midge/Judy). I received Portrait of Carlotta and I wrote To Live My Life the Way I Want and you could read both but definitely the former.

I've kept the fic by fandom and divvied them up into: mostly femslash with some lady-centered gen; mostly het with het-background gen; mostly slash with some dude-centered gen; gen and threesomes.



( Ladies! Anne of GG, Cagney and Lacey, Carol, Clue, Heiress, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters RPF, Justified, Miss Fisher, Price of Salt, Rosemary and Thyme, Tipping the Velvet, Whip It; 27 )



( Het! 10 Things I Hate About You, Actor RPF, Arrival, Bob's Burgers, Broad City, Brooklyn, Hail Caesar!, Lord Peter, Persuasion, Selfie, The Thin Man; 23 )



( Dudes! All The President's Men, Eagle of the Ninth, Good Will Hunting, Hamilton RPF, Metropolitan, Moby-Dick, Nero Wolfe, Popstar, The Sting; 15 )



( The Rest! GBBO, Poirot, The Martian, Singin' in the Rain; 7 )

For the first time I have finished nearly all of the Yuletide fic I wanted to read before the New Year reveal

Let's start the recs, as we should, with the three (!) fics I received as gifts:

True Blue (2163 words)
Fandom: Clueless (1995)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Dionne Davenport & Cher Horowitz
Characters: Cher Horowitz, Dionne Davenport
Additional Tags: Misses Clause Challenge, Canon - Book & Movie Combination, Flirting, Pillow Fights, Legally Blonde References
Summary: The night before college graduation, Cher and De have a sleepover. It's way existential. Or something.
Their conversation is so perfect! They contrast Cher's law school ambitions with Elle Woods! Couldn't be better.

Slow Hushed Touch (4384 words)
Fandom: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Relationships: Melinda May/Skye
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Babbling, Bonding, Awkward Flirting, Rescue
Summary: "I know you're not a damsel in distress. Damsels can't keep up with me."
A big downside to all the AoS fic is that it feels exhausting, so I really want everyone to check this one out. It's everything you want a Melinda/Skye fic to be, like combat teaching that's more like flirting, and Melinda drawing some lines in the sand that Skye respects but still pushes back on. Seriously fantastic.

Ants (6322 words)
Fandom: New Girl
Rating: General Audiences
Relationships: Jessica Day & Cece Parekh
Characters: Jessica Day (New Girl), Cece Parekh
Additional Tags: Female Friendship, Backstory, Misses Clause Challenge
Summary: Sometimes the unhappiest beginnings make for the happiest of endings.
It's just—it is every single thing I wanted or dreamed of when I asked for Jess and Cece friendship fic. It's really funny, it's totally in tune with where the show is right now, it has all five of them perfectly in character, and even contains a reference to the Golden Girls. Just really so, so, so amazingly good.

One more above the cut because other than my gift fics, this is my favorite story of Yuletide this year:

My Boy Carved Coffins (5346 words)
Fandom: Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Rating: Mature
Relationships: Ishmael/Queequeg, Ishmael/Tranquo, Ishmael/OMC, Ishmael/Sebastian/Pedro
Characters: Ishmael (Moby Dick - Herman Melville), Queequeg (Moby Dick - Herman Melville), Tranquo (Moby Dick - Herman Melville), Sebastian (Moby Dick - Herman Melville), Pedro (Moby Dick - Herman Melville)
Additional Tags: Canonical Character Death
Summary: Ishmael copes with the aftermath of the wreck of the Pequod.
So perfectly Melvillian, with Ishmael carrying Queequeg's coffin around with him from ship to ship to ship, trying to find the homeland of his "husband." And the ending is perfection itself.

Beneath this first cut, one story each from Brick, Casablanca, Lord Peter Wimsey, Golden Girls, Jonny Quest, A League of Their Own, Nancy Drew, The Nanny, Singin' in the Rain and The Third Man

( one-off fantoms )

Two-a-piece from Friends, Justified, Persuasion, and Runaways RPF (KStew/Dakota Fanning)

( two of each )

There are three stories about The Heat (plus one that's really a Gravity story) and really you should just read all of them because The Heat. I'm also reccing all four Frances Ha fics because the one that will speak to you is really more of a matter of personal taste/feelings than quality, as they are all really well done.

( heck yeah movies about ladies )

Four each for Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine

( they're sort of sister sitcoms really )

For New Girl technically it's five fics with the one that I got as a gift, but here are the other four I also recommend.

( jess and cece and winston and nick and schmidt, oh my! )

And finally, twelve more Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fics, including a little of everything.

( Melinda, Skye, Ward, Fitz and Simmons, plus team building and special guest appearances by Maria and Natasha )

I'm also posting these all on tumblr, each by each. Happy reading!

Today I posted the bridge fic between EWFS and the sequel:
Entr'Acte: Harry/Hermione, Draco/Ginny, Pansy/Parvati, Seamus/Dean, Ron/Padma, 7100 words, PG-13. They won the war as teenagers, and now they're moving on with their lives as adults, but they're no longer headed in the same direction.
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Three recs:

1. Yesterday my Pansy/Parvati story ended up on quibbler_report, which is for rare pairings, and one of the other fics was the completely adorable The Photo Album by mozarts_piano: Harry Potter finds a photo album in his son's apartment one day. (Teddy Lupin/James Sirius Potter, Harry Potter, PG)
   
2. Thanks to certain people on my LJ and tumblr, I've been using the suitsmeme as bedtime reading and this is also completely adorable and very accessible even if you haven't seen much of the show: 'Til You Gave Out All Your Skin by mockturtletale. Hilarious.
   
3. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be adding emiliglia's AUBB fic The Greater Good to my delicious account very soon, but I haven't finished it yet. (That is, I read the end and then went back and I'm in part three, but you know, I read the ends of things.)

Anyone available in September to beta 20-25,000 words of Janice Rand/Christine Chapel 1920s Paris AU fic for STBB, please let me know.

So in addition to my awesome Hairspray fic Where I've Been, I also got two Yuletide Madness ficlets! Very exciting!

Double Happiness: Tiger Heart. Jade has lunch with Winston.

WKRP: Morning with Johnny. Bailey tries to talk to Johnny before 3p.m.

Chromatic Yuletide led me to request Double Happiness, and WKRP has been one of my requests as long as I've done Yuletide (which, honestly, I thought would never be fulfilled!) Next year I'll have to come up with all new requests!

Here are my recs: ( Carol Burnett-Julie Andrews Actor RPF, Anne of Green Gables, The Apartment, Stoppard's Arcadia, Arrested Development, Austen (S&S and Persuasion), Brick, Calvin & Hobbes, Golden Girls, Great Gatsby, James Bond, The Runaways (2010), Ramona Series (Beverly Cleary), A Single Man, Victor/Victoria, Whip It, Good Wife/White Collar. )

First, thanks to everyone who replied to my previous post about being a bad fangirl. It's crazy how often any of us feel that way! (it's crazy.) The most frequent reply I received was that if I'm having fun and not harming anyone I can't be doing it wrong. I rarely think of fandom as something that I'm doing for my own self-satisfaction, so I'll have to think about that statement for a while.

A friend asked for my definition of a "good" fangirl, and while I gave it to her in the comments I decided that rather than laying it out here, I'd flip it and talk about the things that I do that I feel aren't really in that definition. (Turning negatives into positives makes me feel a lot better.) This isn't about disparaging the majority, hopefully, but about celebrating the minority!! So today's aspect: ( schmoop, fluff, comfort, domesticity. )

Anyway, I got two really splendid comfort fics a few weeks ago and wanted to share them with you all! (I wrote some recently as well, but like all my comment fic it needs a bit of a clean up before I post it)

Dear amyamy wrote me some Kirk/McCoy, Seeking Slumber, the night before I left for Infinitus. I had to get up at ridiculous o'clock to get on a plane and a conversation with a friend had both gone too late and upset me a good deal; she came on chat and calmed me down and I was able to get to sleep. When I woke up, this adorable little fic was in my email.

Last month someone posted a fandom secret about how they often wrote comfort fic for their friends but no one wrote it for them. In the comments I sympathized and noted that when I'd been mugged not long ago I'd asked just for links to comfort fic and didn't get many. And then in the comments of fandomsecrets, shadowbyrd wrote me some delightful Percy/Oliver fluff!

Link me if you can--what's some fluffy/schmoopy fic that you've been enjoying?

Now that Castle has been renewed I can happily look forward to another season for all my scripted shows: HIMYM, Castle, Community, White Collar and Glee. I'm also enjoying Justified so far; anyone else watching that?

Speaking of Glee, I had the privilege of beta'ing kitsune13's Every Rule I Had. It's Will/Quinn, a really lovely ride if you like those characters. And sure, somewhat of a forbidden love, but come on, it's Catja. She was incest when incest wasn't cool, so a little teacher/student really isn't going to faze her.

Generally I wait until things are done to rec them, but I do know that honestys_easy has finished writing her story, a western AU about David Cook and his own merry band of bank robbers with a dollop of AI8 characters as the nice townfolk (and as deputy, one Kris Allen). Even if you're not in Cook fandom or Idol fandom I think you'll find a lot to like in Outlaw's Prayer.

Another story I've been working on as a beta, and is also nearly finished (all but the epilogue), is ali_wildgoose's Something to Hold Onto. It's Avatar: the Last Airbender, Jet/Zuko, and I'll let Ali explain: "This is an AU that takes place during Season Three, and is built on the conceit that Jet never saw Iroh Firebending his tea." Tons of adventure, piles of romance, seriously what more do you people need?

I requested Kim and Lindsay from Freaks and Geeks, and got TWO gift fics!

Growing Upside Down. Lindsay finally discovers the part of her she's been trying to find since high school. Femslash.

write her name in the sky. Kim broke up with Daniel for the last time three days after she and Lindsay got back from their summer adventure.

There were also two Rymon fics written for Yuletide this year, the first for ignaz and the second for delilah_joy:

And When It Was Good. There are shows when it's good, when they're on.

Where We're Going, and How to Get Back. There are things less like relationships.

Go, read, comment! Yayness!

I haven't been able to get online much, but now that I'm back in the land of the free wifi and the reliable cell signal, I am writing up the Yuletide reading I've done so far! First, the fandoms I requested: Little House, Idol RPS, WKRP, and The Philadelphia Story.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House books
I've already linked you to the story I got for my Yuletide present, No Doubts. Apparently Charles/Caroline was the request this year because nearly all of the other stories featured them!

• A Land So Wild and Savage starts when Charles was a young man, and ends with him watching Almanzo and Cap going to see the mythical claim south of town. Great perspective on Charles's sense of adventure and need to be free, and the way that Caroline copes with it.
  
• Wisconsin focuses on Caroline, alone with the girls at night in the Big Woods, waiting for Charles to come home from town.
  
• Little Settlement on the Moon can be summed up in three words: steam punk Ingalls. Just go with it; as an experiment in genre crossing it's very interesting.
  
• There were also two stories about the Olesons: Moving West is about the Olesons as a family, and Blue Eyes is about Nellie's jealousy of Laura. I'm not that into the Olesons but if you are, read up!

WKRP: At the Top of the Hour is bizarre and wacky just like the show was, and features Bailey Quarters, Venus, and Andy, so I can't bitch too much that there's no Johnny. If you loved the show you'll definitely like this story!

I just posted about his, so I won't repeat myself too much here, but I'm just over the moon that there is Ryan Seacrest/Simon Cowell in Yuletide and it wasn't even in answer to my request! It's like I got two Yuletide stories instead of just one! There are three other stories in addition to How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away; all centered on David Cook. One is sort of a blockbuster, so be sure to give the other three some love!

As for The Philadelphia Story, well, it's another place where what I love about it and what other people love about it aren't the same thing at all. I adore Liz, and had requested a story about her and Mike. What's been posted are the usual Dexter/Tracy/Mike stories, which while I understand, I'm frankly not that interested in. But if you're less of a fan of Liz than I am, read and enjoy!

First, the fandoms that I either requested, starting with the fics written for me:

Anne of Green Gables: My own gift fic, Where There Is Peace, set during Rilla but focussed instead on the Ford home front in Toronto. And as a sort of companion piece, The Pen and the Sword, where now Rilla and Ken, and Faith and Jem, have to watch their children march off to WWII. Speaking of seeing things from the other side, A Knowledge of Belonging is an excellent Gilbert-POV and as Gilbert has always been my favorite romantic hero I adored it.

Mister Rogers Neighborhood: Natural Theology. A Yuletide Treat (that means it's shorter) in response to my request for X the Owl and Henrietta Pussycat. From Hen's POV, and if you loved the show, you'll love this.

How I Met Your Mother: First, a clever crossover with Buffy: Slayed in Manhattan. The remaining four mostly concern Barney and Robin—two as friends, two as more than that, and you'll have to figure out which are which, as I don't want to spoil any of them: Go Where Life Takes You, Leave No Man Behind, Suit Up, and What They Drink. I adore Barney/Robin.

WKRP: Spark Gap. An ice storm traps Andy at the station Christmas Eve, but at least he has Bailey for company. I had requested Johnny/Bailey so to have a story with lots of Bailey written for someone else fills me with glee. It's like I got all my requests, after all!

Then in the fandoms I offered to write:

Bringing Up Baby: Havana Honeymoon. David and Susan in mid-air. So pitch-perfect you could die. It's being rec'd all over the place, and with very good reason.

Philadelphia Story: Never Did the Course Run Smooth. Mike and Dext talk about life, and Liz, while playing mini-golf. The hazards aren't just on the golf course in this one, and a very real follow up to the film.

Little Miss Sunshine: A Fucking Conversation About Whatever. Dwayne and Frank, on the way back from the contest. Excellent interaction, adorable story.

Yeah, just three, because the forth one … I wrote. So there you go.

So, this isn't a rec journal really, as half the stuff I read I don't think of as something anyone else wants to read, but two things spurred me to this post: allysonsedai mentioning that she wanted to read Rymon fic, and samgrrrl saying that she loved fic recs. So I thought I'd start with a Rymon rec list and then maybe go on from there to put down the fics that I really loved of the various little fandoms I've had "affairs" with, if for no other reason than my own records.

A couple of caveats. I don't like angstfests or downer endings. I avoid stories where Simon is a completely uncaring arse just as much as where he's too fluffy. If any of you know of things that aren't at idolslash, let me know. I'm not including the S6 stories because they're easy to find. All of these, though, are also in my memories.

I would love to be able to point you to the Ur-text, the "this is why we love them", the "this is the best story of how they got together" but it doesn't exist. This may be because they don't give good slow burn, but rather seem to me like a collision of planets, a sort of immediate connection, and the story is rather more when (or if) they stopped just fucking and really fell for each other. And there aren't even that many stories to begin with. So I give you six stories to read right now, four more worth checking out, one that has its moments, and the lowdown on the rest.

( Rymon recs. )

Happy reading!