it's a magical world

I did mention that I wouldn't manage to post every day, right?

3 – For each of the fandoms from day two, what were your favorite characters to write?

Now I remember why I haven't continued this meme in a while! Because it took so freaking long to list the fandoms on day 2, and now I gotta do that shit all over again! Sigh.

Lotrips - all I ever cared about were the hobbits (and occasionally Orli). I honestly don't remember having a particular favorite one of them to write. Probably Dom, because he was my favorite in general. Dom was fun. Elijah was mostly fun to write from other characters' POVs, because let's face it, he was basically an overgrown puppy at that point.

X-Men - I tend to prefer Erik POV overall. His perspective is sharp and clean and straightforward. It's a lot harder for me to get into Charles's head. In the Boden's Mate verse, though, Alex was far and away my favorite to write.

HP - Remus, always. Always and always. I enjoyed writing Sirius a lot in the Marauders era (and just the Marauders in general), but I wouldn't touch post-Azkaban Sirius POV with a ten-foot pole. I'm fairly certain that every single post-POA fic I wrote was Remus POV instead (with one glaring exception being The Love Song of Sirius Black, which was something else entirely, but even then I shied away from confronting his experience in Azkaban).

Doctor Who / Torchwood - Um, Ianto, obviously. ;) Although the time or two I wrote John Hart was SUPER FUN.

LotR - eh. I guess Merry or Pippin. I only cared about the hobbits, again.

History Boys - SCRIPPS! I might over-identify with Scripps slightly. Except for the religion thing. There I'm more of a Posner.

House - Well, House. Because it's very freeing to write from the POV of someone who has zero fucks to give.

MCU - Bucky in terms of POV, but in terms of side characters, toss-up between Sam and Tony. Because dialogue.

I'm not gonna bother with the rest, I didn't write enough to play favorites.

( the rest of the days )

All right, fuck this noise, I want to get back into a fannish mindset. After posting about my lack of fannishness on Friday night, I promptly opened my Steve/Bucky WIP of Doom and stayed up until 2am revising & completing it. Which makes it the first fic I've completed in 2015. SIGH. But still! That's in beta now, and I don't actually want it to be the ONLY fic I complete in 2015, so I need to start thinking about fic again. With that in mind, stealing the "30 Days of Fanfic" meme from escritoireazul (and probably other people as well).

I won't actually post every day, but I'll get through it eventually.

1 – How did you first get into writing fanfic, and what was the first fandom you wrote for? What do you think it was about that fandom that pulled you in?
X-Files! I was thirteen and obsessed with the show, and found an AOL chatroom devoted entirely to X-Files discussion. (Yeah, it's dated, but at least it wasn't an IRC chat!) Finally, a community of fans just as obsessive as I was! At some point, someone there must've linked to fanfic, and the idea of CONTINUING THE STORY hit alllll of my little thirteen-year-old buttons. I started reading anything I could find, particularly once I figured out what MSR meant. (Mulder/Scully Romance, FYI.) My bitty shipper heart grew three sizes that day. The show itself was awesome, but there were people out there writing the stories the show never actually told! Where Mulder and Scully finally, like, kissed! Very exciting. And since I'd been writing short stories since I was a small child, it wasn't much of a leap to writing my own fanfic, too.

My first fic was a character study of Agent Pendrell, oddly enough. Go figure.

( all the days )

Hello, internet. I seem to have forgotten how to fandom. Apparently I haven't posted in a month? I also haven't been...fandoming at all, lately. I try to check DW/LJ every other day, and tumblr once or twice a week, but I'm just not feeling it right now. Work is pretty good, but it's draining, and I'm obscenely busy with the Gay Geeks in my downtime, and the combination leaves very little energy left over for fandom. I miss it. Or I guess I miss wanting to participate in it. The MCU fandom's response to Age of Ultron really soured me, and since that was my primary fandom, I've kind of disconnected entirely. I've had writer's block for months and I can't even muster up any vidding mojo lately, so 2015 has been kind of a dead year for me fannishly. Oh, well, this too shall pass.

azewewish tagged me in a WIP meme, though, so here we go: Pull seven lines from the seventh page of your WIP, then you're supposed to tag seven other writers.

The only WIP I have that's longer than 7 pages is of course the shitty Steve/Bucky fic of perpetual unfinishedness, so here you go. I'm fudging a little, since halfway through page 7 is a scene break, so I'll do the 7 lines leading up to it:

Steve slumps down into the chair. The shield drops to the floor at his side with a faint clang. He props his head up in his hands and stares at the video feed of Bucky's room. After a few long minutes, he feels a hand on his shoulder.

"Have you called Sam?" Natasha asks him in a low tone. "You should call Sam."

He shakes his head slowly, not taking his eyes off Bucky. "I'm not gonna bother him at this hour."

"I'm calling Sam," she says firmly. "You are staying put until he gets here, and then he is going to explain to you in terms you can understand why it's a really terrible idea for you to go charging in on Barnes right now. In the meantime…" She pauses, then slides a pad of paper and a pen across the desk to him. "We have a guard stationed down on his level. If you'd like to write him a note, I can ask him to leave it somewhere Barnes will see it when he wakes up."

Steve stares at the pad in front of him. What could he possibly write? His mind feels as blank as the paper. "I just want him to know I'm here, if he -- just that I'm here. Could you just…" A thought occurs, and he reaches down to grip his shield. "Can you put this in the room with him?"

Bucky had saved the shield from the Potomac himself, unprompted. He'd carried it with him for a month before their paths crossed again, and he'd been holding it tightly when Steve found him mid-breakdown. The shield obviously meant something to him. It's a better message than any words Steve could possibly write down.

Natasha hesitates, then accepts the shield from him. He doesn't think she's ever actually held it before. "Okay," she says. "I can do that."

Tagging anyone who has a WIP they'd like to share with the class.

Since I'm already halfway through January, I may as well give up on waiting for the Steve/Bucky fic to be finished before I do my yearly writing/vidding roundup. I'm still giving myself credit for those 30k words of WIP in my total word count, though. I fucking earned those for 2014. And actually, if you add that in, I actually did write about 15k more words in 2014 than in 2013, even though I posted fewer fics total.

On the plus side, BANNER YEAR FOR VIDS. This is the first year I've produced more vids than fics. By which I mean TWICE AS MANY. Weird.

( by the numbers )

( fannish year in review )

( bonus WIP snippets: Steve/Bucky + X-Men/Firefly fusion )

I am strangely unstressed about Yuletide, despite the fact that the deadline is in less than twenty hours and my fic is not yet complete. Maybe it's because I had a good writing session last night, and I know I don't have much further to go, and anyway the whole thing is gonna be very short (which for me means less than 3000 words). So...yeah, I'll finish that tonight. It'll probably go unbetaed, but for this particular fic, that doesn't bother me. (I've rarely had much luck with Yuletide betas, anyway.) Incidentally, though -- is there no IRC chat this year? Or has it just moved to a site I don't know about?

Had a good second interview for the "interesting" job today. It still pays too little, and the work would either be really interesting or really stressful, but I got a REALLY good vibe re: office culture, which is pretty important to me after the toxic nature of the kids theater. They're going to bring me into the office Monday to shadow the current person in the position and see if it feels like a good fit, which is kinda weird but also kind of awesome in terms of making a smart choice about the job. (I'm not sure if any other candidates are doing this as well, or if I'm their top choice.) So...that. I'm more optimistic than I was expecting, at least. And while the starting pay is low, it's still within my budget, and there's definitely opportunity for growth (and bonuses). Plus they're very flexible/reasonable about the possibility of me picking up stage management gigs on the side, which would not be the case with the other job I interviewed for (due to potential conflict of interest).

Plus I just got offered a show in April for a theater group I've worked with before and loved, and they actually pay okay, so if I can juggle the schedules, that would be nice.

In other news -- December posting meme!

ranalore asked: What makes for a good viddable song?

I am firmly of the opinion that ANY song is viddable...with the right vidder. So there are certain sorts of songs that I do well with, and some that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. But that doesn't mean those songs wouldn't make awesome vids! Just that I'm not the right person to make them. BUT ANYWAY. I'm generally drawn to lyrics/lyricality first and foremost; I prefer songs that really tell a story, either through the lyrics or through the music. I don't like highly repetitive songs, which is why I very rarely vid pop songs, unless I can twist them into meta commentary -- i.e. Die Young taken literally for a Buffy vid. I love Vienna Teng and Tom McRae (maybe a little too much), because the lyrics are sharp and smart, the music is often surprising, and the choruses tend to shift musically with each repetition. But really, it's mainly that a song needs to click in my head as belonging to a certain fandom/character/idea. Often it's a single lyric that sells me -- for Human, which had been in the back of my head for a while as a potential sci-fi/fantasy vid, the lines "And so long to devotion / you taught me everything I know / wave goodbye, wish me well / you've gotta let me go" were SO OBVIOUSLY about the Raven/Charles relationship that I basically just hopped around impatiently until good DoFP source became available and I could vid it. More rarely, I have a strong idea for a vid and then basically shop around for a song that matches; for example, I knew I wanted to make a creepy Wishverse (Buffy) vid, but it took some searching before I latched onto the theme from Rosemary's Baby as the right music.

I have been making an effort to vary my music selection for vidding lately, because while I COULD easily vid every single Vienna Teng and Tom McRae song, that doesn't mean I SHOULD. But my personal musical tastes are fairly limited, in terms of what I actually listen to on a regular basis, so it's kind of an ongoing process finding new material to work with. I'm not really a music fan -- by which I mean, I LIKE music, obviously, but I'm not fannish about it, and I don't seek out new artists or care at all about bands or ever attend concerts. So maybe it's kind of weird that I get so obsessive about vidding. I dunno.

So as you may have guessed, while I did not sign up for Secret Mutant this year, I did pick up a pinch hit. Which I wrote most of in one frantic all-night session and then finished up the next day, and huge thanks to pocky_slash for the last-minute beta on top of her writing three pinch hits of her own AND, y'know, running the entire exchange.

I didn't try to make a guessing game out of it this year, but this one was mine:

Tabula Rasa (6224 words) by kaydeefalls
Fandom: X-Men (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, 5 Things, all the aus, Meet-Cute, ...sorta
Summary: Five ways Erik might have first met Charles.

( some blather about writing it which will make no sense unless you've already read the fic )

All right, let's do this thing. (There are still several unclaimed days, if anyone wants to add to it!)

From via_ostiense: thought processes, ideas, any commentary on writing Queen's Gambit?

Ah, yes, the three-year fic. And here I thought I could finally stop talking about it now that it's done. :P ( lots of ramble ahead )

I am just copying and pasting my Yuletide letter from last year. Let's be real, my tastes are fairly consistent.

DEAR YULEBAT:

Basically, you are awesome. Because there is nothing about the fandoms requested that I don't love. More importantly, there are no characters in any of these fandoms that I don't love with an all-consuming passion, because seriously, THEY ARE ALL AMAZING AND BRILLIANT AND SPARKLY. I don't care, I love them all.

So here are some quick and dirty things that I like and don't like in fics in general:

LIKES: witty banter, wacky hijinks, random shenanigans, everyone being a BAMF in their own particular way, long plotty fics, quick incisive character studies, romance, friendship, TEAMS, ensemble casts, happy (or realistic but generally hopeful) endings, boys being boys, girls kicking butt and taking names, first time fic of any rating.

DISLIKES: torture porn, excessive angst, excessive schmoop, mpreg, hardcore kink, kid!fic, character bashing of any kind, humiliation, death!fic.

But really, my dear author, I'm pretty easy. As long as you avoid the "dislikes" list, write whatever suits you and the fandom and the story you want to tell, and I will LOVE it. Sure, I'm a fan of happy-ish endings, but if you want to break my heart instead? Go right ahead and shatter it into a million pieces, it's all good. The "likes" list are by no means mandatory in any way, write what you want, I have complete faith in you.

I have nothing fandom-specific or request-specific to add that wasn't on my sign-up forms, but for posterity, my Yuletide requests are below: ( Fandoms: Band of Brothers, Code Name Verity, Red Doors, Life (TV), Valor series - Tanya Huff, The Sting )

Okay, I am not writing this, because I don't think I could handle it properly, but I'd really like to read an MCU!Captain America AU set during the Vietnam War. Because so much of who Steve becomes is forged in WWII -- which, in the end, was a just war, where it was obvious who the bad guys were and what made them bad. I want to see Steve becoming Captain America during a war that permanently tarnishes America's image in the world, and struggling with what that means.

I want to see the story where Steve has just as much heart, just as much determination to make things right, but is thrust into a conflict where there are no good guys and there is no moral imperative and he's not sure we ever should have gotten involved in the first place. Maybe Steve and Bucky enlisted early on, before anyone understood what a mess they were getting into. Maybe Bucky got drafted and Steve only tried to enlist in order to go with him. Maybe that loyalty, that determination, is what Erskine spotted in him, why Steve was chosen -- because of course the military wanted to create an army of supersoldiers to crush the Commies, but Erskine wanted someone pure, someone truly good, someone morally strong enough to turn the tide of public opinion. Someone who would be able to make the right choices in impossible situations. But as the war goes on, Steve becomes increasingly horrified by what his country is doing and Bucky (always the realist) becomes dark and cynical and angry but loves Steve too much to walk away from him (not that the army would ever let him out anyway) and the problem with this whole concept is that I can't see anyone getting out of it alive.

(Also, super problematic when it comes to figuring out who the Red Skull and Zola would be in this AU -- Viet Cong? Um, god no. Soviets? Ugh.)

Still. Steve struggling with figuring out what the right thing is in an untenable conflict. Bucky's whole unit getting captured and sent to a POW camp, and of course no one's coming to rescue them. Peggy the intelligence agent who's completely disillusioned by the war and knows there's no winning but she stays because she's trying to keep her people alive. Steve fighting on only to defend those who can't fight for themselves, but the locals don't even want him here and hell, he can't blame 'em (ugh please no horrible White Savior trope, that is not where I want this to go). What it means to be Captain America when America is forcibly shoving itself in where it doesn't belong, when Steve feels like he's becoming exactly the sort of bully he'd always hated.

Um. So that's sort of bleak. But I think it would be fascinating?

(I also think it's just as possible that Steve would've been at the head of the antiwar protests back home, would've become known as "Captain America" in a countercultural sort of way, and that story would be interesting, too. I guess he never would've gotten the serum, though. Or maybe that's when Bucky got drafted and Steve followed him because what the hell else was he supposed to do?)

I will say, the nice thing about having three active WIPs is that I can kind of bounce between them depending on my mood and write little bits and bobs here and there and still feel like I'm making some kind of progress. Which is nice, because the Steve fic is at about 7000 words right now and probably not even halfway done yet, and that's freaking me out a bit, so it helps to focus on the other ones instead.

( blather about Queen's Gambit, mostly, because talking it out helps me organize the thoughts in my head )

Much like 2012, I sucked at being fannish this year. For once, my primary pull away from fandom was actually being social and reasonably busy in my real life, as opposed to being swamped with working too many jobs and lonely and depressed. 2013 treated me better than any year has in a while, although there's still plenty of room for improvement, so while I didn't produce as much fic as I would have liked, I'm not particularly sorry about it. (I AM sorry for still not having finished Queen's Gambit, if only because having that damn thing hanging over my head constantly is really freaking aggravating now.) My word count for this year is about 10k lower than it was for 2012, but I did create more total fics and vids this year. The fics were just shorter overall. And I dunno what the equivalent for word count should be for vids -- length in minutes?

So while I wait for the new Sherlock episode (!!!) to download, here comes the usual yearly writing/vidding round-up. Also, at the end there's a scene from the next chapter of Queen's Gambit, as my promise that I really will finish it someday.

( by the numbers )

( fannish year in review )

My Yuletide fic continues to be more or less nonexistent, with less than 36 hours to deadline, so that's a thing. But in the meantime, Secret Mutant fics have been revealed! I haven't been posting about this at all, because me and the free time this week haven't been very mixy, and I haven't read very many of the fics yet so I can't do a rec post -- um, not that I ever do rec posts, I suck -- but I did get the most fantastic gift EVER: Xmas in Connecticut, by the incomparable Yahtzee. It's already been recced all over the place, for good reason, but guys, it's REALLY REALLY GOOD. Charles/Erik on the homefront in WWII, Raven being SPECTACULAR, and very sweet background Raven/Hank. READ IT. LOVE IT.

So then I wrote a thing. Or, well, two things, one for the exchange proper and one for Secret Mutant Madness. But both in the same 'verse. I feel like these are very obviously my fics, but because the main fic focused on an unpopular ship, not many people read them or would know to link them to me. ANYWAY.

tell them I ain't coming back (14186 words) by kaydeefalls
Fandom: X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men (Movieverse), Firefly
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Armando Muñoz/Alex Summers, Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Characters: Armando Muñoz, Alex Summers, Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, Raven | Mystique, Hank McCoy, Emma Frost, Angel Salvadore
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Alternate Universe - Space, Families of Choice, Spaceships, Slow Burn, Plotty, POV Character of Color
Summary: In which the crew of Cerebro picks up a passenger on a border moon, Emma has a lead on an anti-mutant conspiracy, and Armando might be getting more than he bargained for. (Fusion with the Firefly 'verse.)

My recipient, unveiled, prompted: "Darwin and Havok IN SPACE!" -- which, for me, obviously meant a Firefly fusion, because there is nothing in the world I enjoy more than crossovers with Firefly. Plus, I've always liked Armando/Alex as a ship, but there are tragically few fics written about them, though it's moderately popular as a background pairing in Charles/Erik fics. So this was fun! I've written a fair amount of Alex POV through the Boden's Mate 'verse, but Alex in that AU has a backstory all his own, so it's not the same, and I've never written Armando POV at all. He was a bit tricky for me, because he's a very calm, likeable character by nature, but it was hard for me to work out what his driving motivations would be. And then, y'know, I made it a Firefly fusion, which meant I had to write the entire fic in the vernacular of that 'verse, which was a special challenge of its own. I rewatched a LOT of Firefly to get that voice sorted in my head. But I really fell in love with the fusion as I was writing it, and realized as I was sketching out an outline that I had buckets of backstory for various characters that didn't fit into an Armando/Alex-centric story, plus a whole category of plot notes that I labeled "SAVE IT FOR THE SEQUEL", so, um, this is a 'verse that I will likely return to. I kind of don't care if only like three other people will be reading it. In terms of Firefly, this fic is roughly concurrent with "Serenity" and "The Train Job", about five years after Unification; the crew of Cerebro works a slightly different route than that of Serenity, so while they may have a few associates in common, they don't tend to visit the same Rim worlds or pick up the same sort of jobs, though everyone passes through Persephone at some point.

And since I really liked ALL of unveiled's prompts (seriously, if I had the time, I would have written a fic for all four of them, they were that awesome), and my head was already filled to the brim with backstory for characters who weren't Alex or Armando, this happened:

burn the land and boil the sea (5410 words) by kaydeefalls
Fandom: X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men (Movies), Firefly
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Characters: Erik Lehnsherr, Charles Xavier, Hank McCoy
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, First Meetings, War, Romance, Alternate Universe - Firefly Verse, Prequel
Summary: In which the Unification War begins, Erik leads the Browncoats' mutant faction, and Charles searches for something worth fighting for.

This prompt was: "Charles is a world-weary activist and advocate. Erik is the idealistic firebrand who sets his life alight." SO YEAH THAT HAPPENED. I originally thought it'd be Charles POV, at home in the Core as war was breaking out, seeing vids of this random Browncoat mutant on the Cortex and becoming increasingly intrigued, and then maybe Raven introduced them somehow? But that never really took shape in my head, and the more I thought about it, the more it became Erik's story instead. I dunno. This one was written in a rush to make the Madness deadline -- most of it in one epic late-night writing session -- and I wish I'd been able to take more time with it, but I like it anyway.

I have to finish Yuletide and then Festivids, and the final two chapters of Queen's Gambit are next up on the docket -- I'd hoped to have one done before the seasonal challenge madness set in, but alas, that was not to be, although I've made decent headway -- but after that, I'm likely going to return to this playground for a while. It's been a while since I've been this excited about a fic idea, anyway. Continuing with using lyrics from the Firefly theme as titles, because at this point I may as well accept it, I know that "take me where I cannot stand" is Charles POV of the end of the Unification War, when he and Erik finally take down Shaw but lose the war anyway. Then probably "take me out to the black" is the crew of Cerebro gradually coming together in the first year or so after the war ends. I have BUCKETS of Angel backstory -- dunno if that'll fit in there, or if she'll get her own spinoff fic that no one will read. And then I want to start overlapping with the events of Firefly and Serenity more, following up the plot threads left unresolved at the end of the Alex/Armando fic. I know for certain that in this AU fusion, River Tam is also a mutant (telepath/empath -- she can't control people like Charles, but she has a much wider range, and some precognitive abilities). The Miranda broadcast at the end of Serenity will spark off a second revolution of some kind, which Charles&co will be heavily involved in. I haven't worked out the details yet. But yeah.

< / blather >