Whee! GUESS WHAT STORY I WROTE? THIS ONE:


Title: The Very Important Quest
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Arthur/Merlin
Word Count: ~25,000
Warnings: Veg*n warning: Gory death of animals within. Also taxidermy. (These two warnings are unrelated.)
Summary: On a Very Important Quest, Arthur and Merlin share clothes, beds, bathwater and secrets.
Author's Notes: Written for amysthystluna in merlin_holidays (original post). My awesome betas and cheerleaders: eyebrowofdoom, doro, copracat & nixwilliams!)

Read on the AO3 or on the merlin_holiday community.


AND NOW TO ANSWER ALL THE DELIGHTFUL COMMENTS! :D


And yay! tsukishirou wrote the lovely furor scribendi. for me! ♥

Do I want to sign up for paperlegends Merlin Big Bang?

I have a couple of epic canon story ideas that could easily be 30K+. But I don't know if I'm very good at writing at the moment.

Maybe I'll sign up and see how it goes...

Sign ups don't start for another month or so anyway.

But it would be nice to actually sign up for and COMPLETE a big bang for once, especially seeing as I know I'm actually capable of writing that much.

Hrrrrm.

Fanworks I am proud of creating:

• EVP: Supernatural Fic Podcast
  I put this together back in 2006, organising and editing together an issue every fortnight for a handful of months. In hindsight, whoa. (I was writing a thesis, running a wiki, vidding and writing at the same time.) That was fun. Wish I had the energy to do something like that again!


• SupernaturalWiki
  While missyjack basically runs this now, I still host it and am so proud of how far it's come since I set it up. The wiki gets over 300K visitors per month, at about a 50/50 split of new and regular visitors, and has over 2000 articles. And no wank! It's a pretty damn awesome community and site.


• Firefly fic: Stroke of Luck
  I still love this epic Jayne/Simon AU I wrote. In hindsight, I cringe a bit that I didn't even have it beta read, but I still have a great fondness for and proudness of it.


• Merlin fic: Along a Wandering Wind
  The longest thing I've every written, and I think I worked harder on this fic than any other I've ever written. At this point in time, it's definitely my favourite of all my fanworks.


• Torchwood fic: We Happy Few
  The second-longest thing I've written, that also had a lot of hard work go into it. It was so satisfying to write this - the culmination of a million shit-talking story-telling conversations had with friends about the adorable ridiculousness of team Torchwood.


• Torchwood/pulp novel mashup fanart
  I love making fanart, I don't do enough of it. These still make me so happy to look at, and make me pine for doing more art like this.

(FYI: Day 1 Snowflake Challenge)

What anatsuno said.

Dreamwidth account creation is open (i.e. don't require an invite code) until next year. (And even after that, invite codes are easy to come by!) It's also very easy to import your journal and comments from LJ and continue to crosspost if you wish.

I get the "but all the fannish community stuff happens on LJ!", I really do. (That's why I still use mine!) But please remember that YOU are part of "everyone", and if you start the shift, then you're helping to build the community in a friendlier space.

If you're a friend on LJ and have a dreamwidth and you're planning on crossposting, let me know? I will remove you from my reading filter on LJ and read you on dth instead, if that's the case. (But please, PLEASE let me know that you are consistently crossposting when you give me your username - there have been times when I've added someone to read on dth and removed them on LJ and then not seen anything from them for a year because they don't crosspost. Argh!)

And, like, don't be scared of crossposting. Just set it up once then put an "update journal" link in your bookmarks, and click on it when you want to post to your journals and bam, no great extra effort from updating LJ.

For the record, here is who I'm voting for in the OTW elections starting today/tomorrow:

Julia Beck
Nikisha Sanders
Jenny Scott-Thompson
Betsy Rosenblatt

As well as being involved in the OTW since its beginning (I served as a committee chair in the organisation's first term, and have since been a user, member and casual volunteer) and forming my own opinions on the candidates and who I believe to be best for the future of the organisation, I have been reading a lot of writing by others who are invested. Because I don't have the time/energy to write up a great manifesto myself, if you want to hear about more of my reasoning, go and read bookshop's recent post on hir endorsements and the latest issues.

But I will summarise why I am not voting for Naomi Novik:

• Having worked under her (when she was board president), I had a terrible experience as a staffer which I believe stemmed from very poor board management of the huge range of skilled volunteers (there are many, many elections posts out there that prove I'm not alone in feeling under-valued, ignored, thwarted and burnt out).


• NN is an amazing, creative, dynamic coder, yes. The Archive can still benefit from her brilliant coding skills and work ethic when she's not on the board. In fact, it would probably utilise her skills better to have her on the ADT committee coding all the time, instead of spreading out her time/energy on board things as well.


• In addition to the point above, yes, she is a great coder. Yes, she has done fantastic work on the Archive. I do not believe that these are reasons she should be elected to the board. I am voting for who I believe will provide the organisation with excellent governance, not who should be rewarded for being good at something else entirely. I can't reiterate this enough: the board elections are not a reward, fandom awards, popularity contest or personality test. They are an opportunity to elect suitable representatives of the membership to govern the organisation and guide it into a better future.


• Both in terms of managing human resources and managing the code itself, the OTW is deeply flawed. I don't believe this is intentional, or that the staffers working in the OTW haven't poured their hearts and souls into its projects. But I am deeply invested in this organisation, and believe that these two things especially are in desperate need of review and change, if the organisation is to grow in a positive direction and not leave the very people it's supposed to be caring for (fans!) miserable and exhausted. From reading what NN has said during the campaign, and from my own personal experience of her governance, I do not believe she is committed to acknowledging and rectifying these issues.

Happy voting!

You know, kid!me would be so freaking stoked if she could see me now:

- Eating a midnight snack
- Because I'm staying up as late as I want
- Writing a high fantasy story
- With lots of gay in it
- While my dorky cat cavorts nearby.

Yeah. At least I got all that stuff right!

Title: Post Meridian
Author: hope / angstslashhope
Fandom: Merlin (BBC)
Wordcount: ~3,800
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Arthur/Merlin
Warning(s): Spoilers for 4.03, and (highlight to reveal) brief dubcon (sex is initiated while one character is still asleep)
Beta: ella_bane is awesomesauce :D

Summary:

“What is it,” Arthur says, gentler; he’s always less acerbic when he’s got his clothes off, and Merlin has an expression like that: like he’s so wide open that even a playful assault could wound him. “You’re too good for a tumble with a king?”

read on the AO3 or below:

( Read more... )

I made a couple of graphics for merlingwainebar's banner contest. Posting here for posterity because I'm a completist.

( Read more... )

It's been a while since I've made fanart. I forget how nice it is to stare at pretty faces for hours on end when doing graphics! Still wish I could draw, though.

I don't have anything here yet, mainly because I don't know what to say! Feel free to leave an anon comment here or on my prompt if you need to ask me anything.

It's still pretty frivolous, but I tidied up the Merlin/Gwaine story I wrote for the frottage fest months ago and posted it on the Archive: In the Library.

This message is brought to you by it being nearly midnight and me procrastinating starting a pomodoro to get 25 minutes of writing done before I go to sleep. Sigh.

Because I kept seeing pretty fandom pictures I wanted to reblog BUT COULDN'T BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T PORN!

So I made a fannish tumblr for me to follow all the pretty and repost all the pretty.

http://hopefulfiction.tumblr.com

Will probably get around to friending most of you as I find you :)


ETA: anyone know of any browser extensions that let me be logged in to multiple tumblr accounts at once?

So, since last week I've written about another 8K words - the uni AU is now at about 34,000.

I've finally written to the end of the major plot points/conflicts that I knew I wanted to hit/had planned out, so I'm taking a few days to figure out where to go next (though I think I've got it, now). I'm still not sure how it's going to be concluded, though.

Though, I have some concerns for my pacing - the first 15K spans over two weeks; the second 15K covers a single day. Doh. Ah well, that's what beta reading is for :D

Here, have another snippet: ( Read more... )

Oh my goodness, I think this is my fave Merlin fanart ever (scroll to end of parade!).

I might have to make Arthur and Merlin my phone background or something.

HEART.

I just had a random procrastinaty 45 minutes of reading back through my entries of the past few months, and of course came upon my endless squeeful in-progress posts about writing the Epic Romance. And boy, that was fun!

And I realised I haven't talked much about my latest story, the Uni AU, despite it also rapidly climbing into the tens of thousands. In fact, right now it's just over 26,600 words. And probably has at least another 10K to go. And then lots of re-writing of early scenes, because it took a little while just to get a PLOT going.

Anyway, even though I have the next scene or three all cued up to be written, I'm having trouble getting enthused about writing at the moment, so figured perhaps fishing for some encouragement might help.

So here's a scene. Please read and get excited at me, if you're thus inclined! Naturally, I'm super-freaking-verbose, so the shortest one I could snip and still make reasonable sense still ended up over 1K.

Background for this scene: ( Read more... )

( kicking the footie around in Edinburgh Gardens )

pornspiration is a multifandom LJ community for fans who want to work on their porn writing. From the profile:

The purpose of this comm is to help improve our porn-writing skills--better sex one verb at a time! Whether you’ve never written porn, are looking for fresh inspiration, or have questions about a new kink this is the place to find help! Writing workshops, discussions, and resources are all focused on titillating your muse and giving her them the tools to write those steamy scenes.

I'm kind of excited about this community. Since I started writing NC-17 stories in Torchwood, I have become more and more interested in the mentality and technicalities of writing fannish porn, especially in that exhilarating/terrifying period when you're doing it for the first time. I've been itching to meta on it, or write a subjective guide to it (I think someone - neifile7? - cheekily suggested "masterclass" last time I vaguely discussed this) for quite a while.

So, it looks like pornspiration might be a great context to do it in. Already someone in the "ideas" post there has made a comment about wanting a workshop on "fluidly integrating porn into story" for first-time porn writers in particular, which I'd love to do. And I'm also interested in doing something on the mentality of first-time porn writing-- breaking through that nervousness/self-consciousness/anxiety that the practice of explicit writing is often shrouded in.

But I need to figure out what a workshop looks like, first, and how I could translate such a thing into that model.

In conclusion: if you're interested in all of this kind of thing, go and join the community! It's locked, for reasons that can be located in their admin docs, so I think it's especially important to go join in at this stage so that it manages to get off the ground. You can share you ideas for what you'd like over there.

If you're not interested in joining the comm, but you're interested in what I'm talking about, then talk to me? Give me ideas about what such a workshop(s) might look like, and what you'd want it to talk about.

So. I've pulled out of merlin_muses - not because I can't write anything, but because the story I started for the prompt has taken on a life of its own. So, rather than trying to rush it and make it fit the prompt, I decided to just let the story take free rein and be what it needs to be and take as long as it needs to take (*sniff* the lil' tyke!).

This also means that I can ramble about it in my journal while I'm writing it (yay!), and also post it when I want it and how I want it, which is exciting, because I think I'll end up including other media in it as well.

So. I am writing a modern AU set in MELBOURNE, supposedly a university AU but so far not much has happened at university (one of the ways I'm departing from the prompt). The 'pairing' is Arthur/Gwen/Morgana/Merlin, and the story is basically about them living in a poly relationship in a sharehouse together.

It is SO FUN to write. So much so that I've written nearly 17,000 words of it, and there's definitely much more to come. It's been a while since I've written actual alternate-universe AU, and characterisation is weird - made weirder still because I'm writing about my home town and stomping grounds, so sometimes the degree to which I'm sinking into autobiography is worrisome.

BUT IT'S STILL FUN! Even though I never thought that flippant idea would require so many words.