Consonants and vowels all together, equally

List now has a bunch of due dates because I've signed up for big bangs and there are a few things that really should be written this summer.

Finished:

• Avengers Clint/Coulson authority figure kink bingo: DONE and posted!
  
• Original story for anthology, due 1 July: DONE and sent to editor
  
• ST Chapel/Rand Radcliffe AU for heroinebigbang, posting date 23 July: DONE, with readers, to be sent to beta by end of week
  
• Community Shirley/Jeff virginity/celibacy kink bingo: DONE, with beta, to be posted by the start of the new season

Other deadlines:

• 14 July is International Day of Femmeslash--what to post? Maybe one of the planned P/P below?
  
• White Collar Diana/El obedience kink bingo: working on this week, as I'm in a bit of a lull, so entirely possible I can get it done before the new season starts on 12 July
  
• Avengers Pepper/Natasha for avengers_rbb, due 13 August (5000 words): awaiting discussion with artist, but have idea
  
• Avengers Pepper/Natasha rock band AU for marvel_bang, due 21 October(10,000 words): working on plot outline
  
• Glee Mercedes/Quinn, to be posted by the start of the new season: 75% done

To be done in the fall/winter:

• Avengers Clint/Coulson tailor AU (needs a plot)
  
• Avengers high school AU (needs a plot)
  
• Avengers hipster AU (needs a plot; might write Pepper/Natasha portion for rbb)
  
• HP Pansy/Millicent school time
  
• Inception Ariadne/Yusuf Vegas AU
  
• Suits Harvey/Mike secret matchmaking for Jessica; not going to finish/post until season ends

It's kink_bingo season again, but I'm not getting a new card because I'm still working toward a blackout of my round three card! I've posted 11 fics and have plans for the remaining 14; and want to get them posted before the next round starts, so another year:

• Avengers Clint/Natasha/Pepper/Coulson whipping/flogging kink bingo (started)
  
• Suits Harvey/Mike collar kink bingo (started); not posting at least until season ends
  
• Suits Harvey/Mike consent play kink bingo; not posting at least until season ends
  
• ST Chapel/Rand phone sex kink bingo
  
• JH Duckie/Cameron medical kink bingo
  
• HP Harry/Hermione nipple play kink bingo
  
• HP Draco/Ginny painplay kink bingo
  
• HP Pansy/Parvati strap-on kink bingo
  
• HP Pansy/Parvati worship kink bingo
  
• HP Pansy/Parvati/Luna/Tonks gangbang kink bingo
  
• HP Seamus/Dean rest of my ff100 claim including two kink bingo squares

( kink bingo card! )

Color War has the day off because I coded it and forgot to post, but that's FINE, it will go up tomorrow. Keep voting, though! There's a close one in Monday's poll so I'm keeping it open a little longer.

Writing-wise, two things:

Hey Trek people: is anyone interested in cheerleading me on this Chapel/Rand I'm writing? I keep getting a little stuck and I think I need a push. It's the Radcliffe side of the Harvard fic, and I'm writing it for heroinebigbang. I think I need other people being excited to keep me going! Let me know and I'll open up a gdoc to you.

Hey all people: sirona_fics is hosting a PAN FANDOM HIGH SCHOOL AU FIC CHALLENGE! Go check it out on livejournal or dreamwidth, go leave prompts, go write a thing, whatever you like!

I am super excited about this, and so of course an idea took me over for a couple of days and I had t write it down to get it out of my head. Given that smilingskull wrote the definitive Trek HS AU, lillijulianne wrote the definitive Idol HS AU, and Harry Potter canon is already at high school, the only place I could go was Avengers, and there's the start of a Natasha/Pepper story in the comments. BUT, I have a bunch of stuff to do before I get back to it, so think of it as a sort of promissory note.

I have a metric ton of other stuff I am/should be working on/finishing. (So much femslash, so little time, seriously.) Given that I don't have a ton of plans I'm not ruling out the idea of just sitting in my AC and writing all summer.

So I've written three short Clint/Coulson fics, and I have two Avengers AUs in the planning stages in my head, one Clint/Coulson-led, and one Pepper/Natasha-led. So what I'd love to try to do before the movie opens here (which for various reasons is nutty but let me have my illusions) is to write three Pepper/Natasha fics and feel all balanced and stuff. At the very least I'll write them before I start the AUs, but that won't happen until July anyway.

Sadly, there isn't the prompt/encouragement machine for Pepper/Natasha that there is for Clint/Coulson, fandom and femslash blah blah blah, so I'm looking to you wonderful people. heidi already directed me to the Avengers Kink Meme, where I found eight prompts, and amyamy gave me one on twitter; you can see them all in my pinboard. I'll probably poke around those porn battles (anyone have links?) and maybe some of you know of some other femslash prompt-a-thons floating around, even if the prompts are a little older?

Meanwhile back to the things I must be writing--happily, I assure you, but still, deadlines are looming ...

So what I didn't realize would happen now, as opposed to in the late spring, is that I'd start writing Clint/Coulson fic. I'd had an AU in my head that I was planning on tackling after I saw the new movie and that's still the plan, but I ended up writing two stories beforehand. I also wrote fic for a couple of K/Mc challenges!

• Let Me Hear Your Body Talk, Kirk/McCoy, finished and posted!
  
• A Beard Is a Sometime Thing, Clint/Coulson, finished and posted!
  
• A High Road Out from Here, Clint/Coulson, finished and posted!
  
• What Happens in Greenwich, Kirk/McCoy, with betas, possible epilogue

What I'm working on, at least in my head:

• White Collar Diana/El, now that the season is over, well started in my little book
  
• an original fic for which I need to figure out how the caper goes (ugh, plots, right?)
  
• ST Chapel/Rand, Radcliffe AU, which is outlined and started

To be done later:

• HP Pansy/Millicent schooltime, and possibly a Pansy/Parvati/Luna/Tonks foursome fic
  
• Avengers C/C AU
  
• Glee Mercedes/Quinn, quite a ways done, and I'm just waiting for the rest of the season to play out before finishing
  
• Community Shirley/Jeff, done "in my head" and waiting for the season to play out before writing
  
• Inception Ariadne/Yusuf Vegas AU, maybe for the next big bang?
  
• Avengers Pepper/Natasha, what I don't know just that the universe needs more of it
  
• HP Seamus/Dean rest of my ff100 claim
  
• Suits Harvey/Mike two fic ideas: secret matchmaking for Jessica, and a weekend off including a nice dinner, apple-picking and pie-making, and corset-wearing (on Harvey's part)

Mostly I need to just WRITE so I don't constantly have this backlog of fic. Also, I think I want to slowly but surely work toward a blackout of my kink bingo card! Here's how it looks right now, including stuff I've planned:

( kink bingo card! )

Once again at BFF C's place in Mass where punch was had and a gong was struck at midnight. Brilliant.

2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002

( 2011 stories written )

( 2011 Stories in Review )

First, thanks to everyone for the good wishes the other day. It'll take me a bit to reply to them all (talking is a little hard right now) but reply I will! It's going to take a while before I'll be bouncing back, and while I'll try not to be negative (because it makes me feel worse) I might not be as positive as usual in the meantime.

In the meantime, a meme! I'll post the working title of a story, and the first sentence, for my most current WIPs. No pairing or summary info. Though for nearly all of these stories, the pairing is given away in the first sentence anyway, and my working titles are all the pairing or the summary, basically. But! First lines! All femslash, mostly multiracial.

1. “Scared?” Quinn said, making a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “I’m terrified.”
   
2. "So tonight," Pansy said, "no sneaking into the club bathroom, no getting yourself off secretly—"
   
3. While their friends moved into perfectly sweet little three-bedroom family homes (well, and Malfoy Manor), Pansy and Parvati thought, penthouse.
   
4. Divorce Granted: Roger Korby and Christine Chapel Korby, filed by Mrs. Korby on grounds of mental incapacitation —The New York Times, April 20, 1920
   
5. The shopping started, as so many things did with the cousins, with Annie Weasley-Wood.
   
6. Christie was talking about the hospital wanting to send her to Boston to help with some training, which, fine, it was only two months and Diana would run up on her days off—that's what trains were for.

( previous days )

30 – Do you have a favorite fic you've written? What makes it your favorite? And don't forget to give us a link!

I'm terrible about favorites--far too loaded a word. Here are links to four stories I've written and why I really love them and you might, too. The first three are pretty accessible even if you're not familiar with the fandom--and a passing familiarity with the universe of Harry Potter is all that's necessary for the last one.

A Dream That Could Not Last (LJ | DW | AO3)--An Idol AU set in London during the Phoney War and the Blitz (1939-40), and very accessible even if you never watched Idol. Het, slash and femslash, and lots of characters of color, plus tons of music. Includes dancing the lindy, snogging in air raid shelters, and horseback riding across a duke's estate. Oh, and fighter pilots. 97,000 words, NC-17, Ryan/Simon, Anwar/Kimberley, Carly/Amanda.

Why I like it: I wanted to write a period piece that had a diverse cast but dealt with that diversity while still being a primarily comic romance, and I think I achieved that. It was an ambitious story, and it did what I wanted it to do.

Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe (LJ | DW | AO3)--Star Trek Hollywood AU, where Kirk, with a crew that includes Sulu and Scotty, directs an indie film based on McCoy's script, with Spock and Uhura producing, starring Chekov, Gaila, and an old pro to be named later. Includes stripping to "Toxic", neurotic pregnant actresses, indie band t-shirts, snarky teenage daughters, and the entire Hollywood awards season. 71,000 words, NC-17, Kirk/McCoy, Spock/Uhura, with some other background ships.

Why I like it: It's pretty subtle, what's going on for these two guys and why they come together and why they do need each other. But it doesn't isolate them--they've got family and friends and coworkers and careers. On top of that is a big, silly, "let's make a movie and maybe we'll win an Oscar" old-fashioned Hollywood story.

Count Me In and Count Me Out (LJ | DW | AO3)--Cameron from Ferris Bueller and Duckie from Pretty in Pink. They had that perfect summer-before-college fling, and haven't seen each other in almost twenty years. 2600 words, R.

Why I like it: This story is about getting back something you've lost, through the eyes of a couple of guys facing their forties.

For Harry Potter, four linked stories. (And there are tons of one-off shippy stories that spin off from these central fics.)
Eight Ways From Sunday (LJ | DW | AO3) and With One Breath (LJ | DW | AO3)--6th year
Entr'Acte (LJ | DW | AO3)--The summer after the war
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing (LJ | DW | AO3)--Three years later
142,000 words total. GoF canon, ensemble, Seamus/Dean, Pansy/Parvati, Harry/Hermione, Draco/Ginny, Ron/Padma

Why I like it: More on this later, but I had a specific, tricky thing I was trying to do with the EWFS sequel, and I think I actually accomplished it, so I'm really, really proud of that story. And then there's EWFS, just about the first thing I wrote in fandom, ever, which set up the universe for all my other Harry Potter fic. If you like stories about friendship and romance and career and trying to figure out where you're headed when you're young, and also the effects of British imperialism on indigenous magical systems, then this is the fic for you.

( previous days )

28 – Have you ever collaborated with anyone else, whether writing together, or having an artist work on a piece about your fic?

I did collaborate on one story for Team Jones for the Ship Wars. It was definitely an enjoyable experience, and really fun, but in a way it didn't really feel like writing. I didn't have a story that had lived in my head for so long I had to write it down; instead, I was trying to create according to someone else's vision. I never felt like it was my story really. It was sort of like doing a really heavy beta for someone else's fic. Which doesn't mean it wasn't enjoyable, but just that it wasn't like what writing is for me.

I don't really consider an artist working on something for my fic to be collaboration, because the fic is the fic and the art is the art, and at the end of the day we do what we want. The artist is inspired by whatever scene in the fic inspires them, and I'm lucky that they felt that way. But then they make the art and the art is theirs, whether it was inspired by my story or not. I wrote some the prose on the fake Variety covers that affectingly made for my STBB last year, but I still consider the art itself to be hers, because she made all the decisions about it, as she should.

Part of why I write fanfic is to write what I want, and part of the fun of it is to realize the vision I have in my head. I have a lot of fun beta'ing and helping people get their fic to where it needs to go, but that's not the same as writing. So I think I'm not a natural collaborator--I want all the control!

( previous days )

26 – What is the oddest (or funnest) thing you've had to research for a fic?

This is I think the toughest question because I never know what other people are going to think is odd or funny. I keep track of dates a lot and timeanddate is totally bookmarked. I'll look up maps for how to get from one place to the next—I just looked up the automotive routes from Paris to the French Riviera, and also where the French ocean liners docked. I read a biography of Natalie Clifford Barney as research.

I've looked up old NYC subway lines, the timing of various cultural events including the entire Hollywood awards season in January-February, the time of sunset on a specific date in a specific place, the proper use of pyrex sex toys, when the Dodgers and the Giants left New York and when the Mets had their first season, makes and models of cars, a lot of fashion, the specifics of the evacuation at Dunkirk, what movies premiered in the summer of 1977 and famous defections of Soviet scientists.

But mostly I look up dates and timelines.

Forgot this yesterday, probably because it's really emotional. Backdating is my friend once again!

( previous days )

24 – Betaing – How many betas do you like to use to make sure there aren't any major flaws in your fic? Do you have a Beta horror story or dream story?

If something is longer, I like to use more than one beta, and hopefully one of them is someone I'll talk to as I'm going along about the plot and where I think I'm going. If it's short, a one shot, I can just have one person look it over for sense and errors.

I once had a very close fandom friend with whom I often discussed what I was writing, and she helped me think about things in bigger ways and was so encouraging, especially for the WWII AU and the early stages of the EWFS sequel. She made me feel like she really wanted to hear about my writing, and that I wasn't imposing. Ely was a fantastic person, and I lost a really good friend when she passed, but also to a much smaller extent a really key person for my writing.

Ali is super fantastic as well, and she's been so helpful for pretty much every long thing I've written in the past few years--the WWII AU, the 90s AU, the EWFS sequel, the Hollywood AU. I also get to read what she's writing, and I really enjoy that kind of reciprocal relationship. It makes me feel more comfortable to ask people to read over what I'm doing when I'm also helping them.

And seriously, there is no one better for beta'ing kink than Catja. No. One. And no one better for encouraging me to write it in the first place than one evil_erato. And I doubt that the recent Pansy/Parvati stuff I've been writing would be as good as I hope it is without slytherincess's help.

The WWII AU in general was probably the dream beta situation. I knew that the story wouldn't have many readers, and I got most of my pleasure in the process. I had about five people reading that story at various points in the process, and while Ali and Ely did most of the heavy lifting in terms of structure and characterization, I wouldn't have gotten through it without Juli's cheerleading nor had the courage to post the thing without Allyson batting clean-up as the SPAG beta and Dana being the unspoiled reader-stand-in. It was really super fantastic, working on that story and feeling like people were excited about it while it was in progress.

I guess the horror story would be the Hollywood AU. I'd come off an unfortunate situation where a beta disappeared on me, so I was nervous about asking people to read my stuff anyway. And then in the course of that story--which really, Ali beta'd from stem to stern with a big late-game assist from Catja--I had three betas drop out on me, two without any sort of notice or communication. It was honestly pretty horrible, probably one of the worst experiences I've had in fandom. I had to chase people down, which I'm not good at because I really hate being a burden or an intrusion (I have a lot of issues surrounding those words). I had people tell me over and over that they were just behind, only to seemingly never really get around to reading it. And these people I had trusted, so I wanted to believe what they were saying to me. It got to the place where I wasn't even excited when I finished a new chapter, because I only saw my writing as a burden for other people--another chapter finished meant that my overburdened betas were even more behind on giving me any feedback. After a January in which I had horrible writer's block, a February where I finally broke through only to have my notebook stolen in a mugging, a March where I could do no more than try to recreate the writing that was lost, and finally hitting a groove with the story in April, to spend all that spring trying to get people to read a story that they had agreed to beta was a little more than I could really handle. I'm so glad that people had such a great reaction to the story, because by the end I was convinced that the whole thing was just a horrible mess, or otherwise why would all these people refuse to read it for me? It was just, unfortunately, a truly lousy writing experience.

It's left me very distrustful of betas to be honest; I don't really believe people who say they'd like to beta for me because they so frequently punk out on me. I don't like asking people to read over my stories, I'm shy about even talking about what I'm writing, and I still see my writing as a burden for someone to have to look over.

It's unfortunate because I actually really like being someone's beta, and I'm not really doing much of that at the moment, either, for various reasons, though I'm hoping to get back into it soon. I miss that kind of relationship I had with Ely, that thing where you're very involved with someone else's writing and you're excited and positive and cheerleading for each other. But I also miss having the sense that when I finish writing something, that someone else will be excited to read it. I think the Hollywood AU experience really broke me of that.

And of course it's all incredibly ironic, since I'm the beta coordinator over at the Jim and Bones community. While I haven't needed a J&B beta since I started as a mod, I have in the guidelines stressed very much that everyone has to be honest and realistic about time commitments before agreeing to work on someone's story. It's really lousy to agree to do a thing and not do it.