Yesterday was wonderful - I spent pretty much the entire day in bed, reading. Though I feel between-fandoms right now, I have somehow suckered onto Merlin fic and have been consuming it voraciously. I think perhaps right now I need the emotional nutrition idfic can provide, and Merlin fic is the most nutritious of all - full of secrets, and misunderstandings, and magical powers, and big revelations. Good for button-hitting. And it's been long enough since I've watched it that the annoying stuff about the show isn't at the forefront of my mind.

So, the other awesome thing that's come of this is omg my iPad is SO GREAT. Finally, the power of ebooks is realised. I just opened up a million tabs, ebookified them and synced them to Bramley. Though it's a bit heavy and a bit bright, it's still miles easier to curl up in bed with than a laptop.

Here are my three favourite links right now:

A Merlin fic, which I stayed up way too late reading last night, and stayed in bed reading far too late this morning, and snuck in chapters at work far too much today: The Student Prince by FayJay.

Archive of Our Own now has a "download as epub (or other portable format)" feature. \o/

And for less friendly websites, Readability! (How did this slip below my radar before?)

Oh, and this is where I learnt how to convert ordinary webpages to epubs (on a Mac).

Naturally, I was the schmuck who signed up to post in the first week of tw_kinkandseek. The kink I chose was "multiple partners".

DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY FREAKING MULTIPLE PARTNERS FICS THERE ARE IN TORCHWOOD FANDOM?

A lot. Last weekend I went through a million tags and communities and genrefinders and kink battle posts and bookmarked a massive swath of them. Then, this evening, I went through each one and listed it, with relevant details, on my kink and seek post.

ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN STORIES, PEOPLE. And that's with me being too tired/lazy to itemise everything in the threesome-themed pornbattle.

*collapse*

This plot:

1. Ianto is sick/hurt.

2. Jack and Owen care for him! Owen is gruff but protective, Jack is concerned and tender.

3. Tosh is mousy and Gwen is insensitive, but in about 50% of stories, you never know this because...

4. Tosh and Gwen are relegated to being [quote]"the girls"[/unquote], who invariably are dispatched to do Ianto's shopping for him.

(4a. If it's a gen story in particular, SOMETIMES you get a POV shift to "the girls" where somewhere on the astral plane, Alison Bechdel is weeping while Tosh tells Gwen to stop being insensitive about Ianto because he and Jack are IN LOVE OMG GWEN HOW COULD YOU NOT SEE IT?)


SRSLY. How many stories?

... I sort of feel like making a flow chart of dodgy TW fic cliches. Would that be bear poking? (Is making this a post public bear poking?)

[Poll #1519127]

This poll on Dth: http://hope.dreamwidth.org/1631742.html

This poll on LJ: http://angstslashhope.livejournal.com/1611906.html

Woot! cupidsbow has just posted today's 12 Days of Cliche work, a rec set for Kidfic and Mpreg in the Torchwood fandom.

I am willing to stand up and be scorned (and secretly - or not so secretly - agreed with): I freaking love this premise in this fandom. There are some brilliantly clever, hilarious and moving stories based around these cliches, and Cathy has recced pretty much all of my favourites.

So, go and check them out!

Am frustrated at myself, as ever, for not being able to articulate what I'm trying to. Have added an ETA to the post about travelling solo as a woman that I made last night.


In other news, here are two response-to-CoE fics that I've read in the past 24 hours - practically polar opposites in how they deal with it, but nonetheless both good reads:

- Shift by iamshadow
- Dance Me to the End of Love by Otrame


My own writing is somewhat stalled. I have a bunch of things on the go (including those timestamps) but I'm struggling to get there. It's frustrating because right now I'm relying on fandom for a lot of my sense of community, and not producing anything feels like I'm severing myself from that. So I feel more desperate to write more, but am probably just shooting myself in the foot as the more I try to force myself to write, the less likely it is to happen. Heh.

For the past month or two I've spent a delightful amount of time alpha and beta reading zortified's new Torchwood fic. Luckily for her, I am unemployed and hormonal, so reading a 22,000 word baby!fic six times has been a pleasure.

Well, it's sort of baby!fic. It's sort of mpreg. But mainly it is a lovely story about (grown up) people and relationships and most importantly, happy endings, which is very satisfying in these post-CoE days. It's also a joy to see a fic written post-CoE that still makes use of all those other tasty spots in canon from S1 & S2 that are so fertile for fic writing.

It was already gleemaking when James first sent it to me, and her cleverness in the characterisation and dynamics have just been honed over the many drafts and re-writing.

In summary: shiny! Read - And You Will Know Her By the Smile in Her Eyes (link to Dreamwidth, where it's all in one post, or you can read it in three parts on LJ starting here).

A while ago I wrote a wee Torchwood/Doctor Who ficlet called Boe, Face of (file under "B"). Someone translated it into Russian. Tooling around on google led me to discover that google had helpfully translated it back into English for me.

The result is truly stunning, and I've re-posted it below the cut for posterity.

( Yanto not understand what is funny, but concluded that the feeling he likes. )


More translated (and subsequently google-translated) fics you may be familiar with can be found here.

Yes, the subject requires allcaps. I have been in a constant state of allcaps since the BB went live.

( three recs! )


And now I step away from the rest of the tabs I have open. Must pace myself... Save some for later... nngh...

I started to read that new, highly-recced Torchwood fic where Jack goes all "The Shining" on the team, but a paragraph or few in I abandoned it to go re-read that story where he and Ianto adopt an infant Ewok instead.

Yeah, I'm not really cut out for darkfic in this fandom. Need to keep my blood sugar levels up in order to write the crackfic (latest development: SEX POLLEN*).


* Note to self: think up clever sciency name for aforementioned sex pollen.