Be my undoing, be my slow road to ruin...

Perpetually behind on everything, so it stands to reason I'm doing this 2011 Fic Recap in February 2012! Stolen from, like, everyone.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2011?

I did think I'd be writing in U2 fandom, thanks to the Concert That Rocked 360 Degrees, so that wasn't a surprise, but I didn't think I'd write a threesome in Guy Gavriel Kay fandom, so thanks, lareinenoire :) I also didn't think I'd be writing breath control play, and it's all fieryrogue's fault.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

I think 2011 felt like The Year of Risks. I dipped my toe in other fandoms: Inception/Inception RPF, U2 RPF, Duran Duran RPF, Lions of Al-Rassan. I wrote more kink - magic realism mpreg and strippers as well as breath-play. I wrote some explicit het! (I also wrote paitac some ridiculous Justin Bieber self-insert fic...)

( Various 2011 fic-related histories )

Choice Lines:

From Three Lions: There was nothing fraternal in the way ibn Khairan followed his hand with his lips, and Jehane bet Ishak slid from his lap into Belmonte's and put her physician's fingers into his hair and her cool mouth against his, and Rodrigo closed his arms around them both as if they might yet hold off the dark for a while, all three of them.

From The Grass Won't Pay No Mind: She's calling out to him, words he can't hear but can feel against his collarbone, his skin, the ink on his skin.

From Four Dreams: He sees the boy called Neil as a palimpsest over the adult Arthur - how Arthur has never shown more than an eyelid's flicker of desire, or moved in this loping, hip-swaying, provocative way. How Eames has never seen the bare, vulnerable flesh under the sharp grey tweed. But now Eames sees those things are there inside Arthur, just below the mysterious surface of this skin.

From Sew It Up: Edge paused by the threshold of their room, where the grey morning heralded storms up ahead, and more if they didn’t navigate this small, true thing very carefully.

“Go,” Edge said, and Bono sighed.

From In the Alleyway: Angel danced like Arch sang, free and unashamed, a million miles away from the teenager who'd taken his first dance lessons with Paula Abdul. As Arch took center stage, he wondered if Paula would approve of Angel's technique. He kind of thought she might, if the shock didn't kill her first.

From The Adventures of the Boy David and Captain Cook: The story said he was the boy who'd never grow up. The story said the Captain would always be his hated nemesis. But the story can't be true forever. Boys grow up, they become men, they fall in love, and love is just hate in reverse.

From Counting Down To Zero: Cook runs his fingers along David's cheekbone. The new scar on his wrist from where his TiMER was removed is raised and red and itches like crazy, but he knows he did the right thing.

He doesn't need a piece of clockwork to tell him what he already knows is true.

Anything Your Heart Desires
(When You Wish Upon a Star)
Cook/Archuleta, PG-13, 2,000+ words
Hundreds of thousands of stores across the known worlds and absolutely nothing to buy.
Written with my dearest frackin_sweet. Beta by rajkumari905.
Written for domesticbingo’s prompt “gift shopping”.
For aohatsu, the awesome remixer of Somewhere Out There. Thank you for your remix, hon. A belated Merry Christmas, and may 2012 bring you the gift of your heart’s desires.
Not for profit work of fiction.



( When you wish upon a star, anything your heart desires will come to you )

Thank you to aohatsu and soverignthorn for their hard work on the disneycookleta challenge. So many lovely Disney AU stories, do head on over to the challenge comm to check them out!

Herewith my darker, conflicted take on Peter Pan the movie.



The Adventures of the Boy David and Captain Cook: The Real Story (as narrated by Wendy C., 13-and-a-half)

Cook/Archuleta, 18,000+ words, betas random00b & maerhys
PG-13 for nudity, violence, underage sexual situations (non-explicit), language
This has all happened before, and will all happen again.
Not for profit work of fiction. Please refer to in-story detailed disclaimer.

On LJ | On AO3

For maerhys, who’s had a birthday, and a hard time lately, and with whom I offered to collaborate on a Neal/all the women multi-chaptered story. I wanted to make this filthy and stylish, bb, as your Neal!het is, but somehow this song had other ideas. I don’t know either, but I hope this made you smile a little :)

this time it is our time
Neal Tiemann/OFC, 1,150+ words, unbetaed.
Neal is flying. Explicit.

Not for profit fiction, no breach of privacy nor intellectual property rights intended. Title from Neil Diamond's And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind

( ...and the grass won't pay no mind )

From celli, whose answer to the world markets going apeshit is, apparently, to spread the fannish love ♥.

The first six people to comment in this post get to request that I write a drabble/ficlet of any pairing/character of their choosing. In return, they have to post this in their journal, regardless of their ability level.

Prompts would help. As you know, I not-so-secretly dig Marysueing, and will write character/you :)

ETA: To feed my Marysueing ways, the following kind people who played this meme with me wrote me the following:
* paitac's hot Suits!AU Give It A Minute It's Gone, [Charles Xavier/me/her], teen;
* aohatsu's adorable Harry Potter!AU Severus Snape/me; [Sirius/Remus], [Remus/her], teen; and
* maerhys's flagrant, delicious suns snagged on empire states, [NealFingTiemann/me], explicit :)))

Now calledmelovely Cookleta remix challenge reveals are up, I wanted to try my hand at making a DVD commentary of Counting Down to Zero for soverignthorn.

I’ve seen this kind of thing done really well before, and thought Kayla might enjoy seeing how (and which parts of) her original story Countdown inspired my remix; also that maybe my process might help someone else with remixing for Round 2?

(And, ngl, I hope my fellow remixers might indulge in DVD commentary also, because I would love to see their process as well! ETA: Okay, I think I sold aohatsu on doing this! \\\o///)

[Spoilers, obviously, are inherent in any DVD commentary, so caveat lector XD.]

( Behind the Countdown… )

As DCook sang: "When writing your history, I will always be a footnote, a warning sign of mistakes made..."

Bingo prompt-writing challenges participated in from June 2010 = 3.
Bingos actually made within bingo-scoring period = zero, FML.

However, I did subsequently get my act together and manage to post two amnesty blackouts and a bingo + 9 extras, frivolously and respectively entitled Endless Love, Shelter me, Comfort me, and The Sound of Worlds Colliding:

Historical: World War II	Other: Actors	Alternate History: Someone never died	Alternate History: Major historical event changed	Other: Castaways
Other: Evil Goateed Universe	Other: Aliens	Other: Film Noir	Fantasy & Supernatural: Witches and Wizards	Alternate History: Someone died/didn’t come back
Fantasy & Supernatural: Author's Choice	Historical: Napoleonic Europe	FREE Other: The Oldest Professions – Lawyers, hookers	Other: Mutants	Historical: Western
Historical: Ancient Civilizations	Other: Criminals	Historical: World War I	Other: High-school	Other: Sports
Fantasy & Supernatural: Vampires	Other: Detectives	Alternate History: Author’s Choice - Someone said no	Future: Author's Choice – Magical Realism Utopia	Other: Police

I’ve never really been too stressed out about word count – it doesn’t necessarily bespeak quality, it just bespeaks long! – but I actually think my word count for 2010 may have come in at northward of 200k words, leaving aside the stories I wrote with frackin_sweet. Which is quite a few more words than I expected...

( Challenges I didn’t flake on... )

In conclusion: in 2010, I totally failed at short. Also, I betaed, received too many fic and art gifts, collaborated with frackin_sweet and clover71, and commissioned art from flawlessnights, ciudad and imlikat. It was my first full year in fandom and an amazing honeymoon year. As some would have it, you never have that year again. ♥

In the words of Neil Young, off "Fork in the Road", "Truth is fiction, truth is lies, strange things happen when worlds collide..."

Weird things happen when you're cycling through fandoms at hyperspeed so you can get back to actual work! You know how fandom seems multitudinous and labyrinthian at first blush? Then you run across familiar people -- leici commenting on an old U2 story, otherbella popping up in Hunger Games fandom, discovering that twistedchick, the lady for whom I was writing a Yuletide treat, was a friend of my beta for that self-same story, cinco -- and suddenly there are intricate connections across fandoms where you least expect them :)

And of course, out of those different fandoms comes the crossover fic ideas :)

To wit: in Inception fandom, I've been stalled on the Anthemic-as-Inception-team idea for ages (c'mon, who doesn't wanna see DCook as scene-chewing Extractor DCobb?), and Part II of Tommy Solomon-and-crew-incept-Archie elevator!fic is still at the planning stage :(

Over at The Hunger Games, it's easy to picture Cook and Archie as Finnick Odair and his beloved Annie, or to imagine the Quarter Quell kids getting their golden tickets to Captiol Hollywood, and singing for their lives on the Idol stage -- where they meet Haymitch as Simon Cowell and Snow as evil 19E Network producer Simon Fuller (and Caesar Flickerman as their host, Ryan Seacrest!); Peeta and Katniss sing Marly's "The Letter"/Kradam's We are the Champions and Finnick sings DCook's "Sharp Dressed Man" - and in a nailbiting photo-finish, the number of votes cast for the top two are exactly the same and there are two American Idols crowned! I kinda want to write that :)

Where worlds collide there are duets, too, of course. evilgeniuslady reminded me of the epic 80s Springsteen/Sting duet on "The River", and how epic it was. Magnificent, and magnificently slashy, these classic rockers in their glorious youth singing each other's words and getting up close and personal in each other's space:



( This is the time of worlds colliding, this is the time of kingdoms falling - Springsteen/Sting/U2 OT6 )

Things do get a little sketchy, though, where RL collides with fandom. I have no problems with the idea of celeb RPF - actors and musicians and entertainment and sports personalities are public figures, and as such they sign on to a certain amout of stanning and fair play in re: those public images. Reclusive Harvard figures and businessmen may however not be quite the same kettle of fish, and although I've followed The Social Network fandom and the Mark/Eduardo fic with interest, I have always felt there's a difference.



( Cut for small-world, small-town TSN-related gossip )

This entry was originally posted on dreamwidth; you can choose to read it there.

Don't mind me, I'm just archiving links to older fic. This should actually be part of the Holiday Hangover series, but I can't be arsed to go back in time to 2010 again. Not that 2011 has been that fantastic, and I don't want to talk about it atm, but I am bitter today.

A collection of stories for hc_bingo and schmoop_bingo - originally posted to the Tulsa Gangstas Advent Calendar 2010 and Cookleta roundtable.

Dinner for Three
Neal/Andy, [R], cumulative 3,200+ words. Betaed by otherbella.
Three times Neal and Andy share a meal. Hunger, cop/criminal AU, erotic feeding, bloodplay, vampires.



( On the docks of the South Side )( At the Waldorf-Astoria )( Inside the fortified Celtic garrison )

Running Through Your Bones (it's easy when you know how)
Dave/Neal, [R], cuddling in vehicle
( Dave's totally wiped from the show. He feels strung out from adrenaline, somehow like he doesn't quite inhabit his skull. )

This entry was originally posted on dreamwidth; you can choose to read it there.

"...Tell me why, ain't nothing but a heartbreak..."

We interrupt the holiday hangover item postage to bring you this cuteness from empressearwig: Selena Gomez and her band take on the Backstreet Boys! With bonus blond, tousled, air-bass-playing ex-Anthemic Joey Clements. I don't know most of these guys, but it's seriously adorable, folks!



Something else adorable: someone's getting cleaned up for serious publicity for someone's impending new album. (Are you happy the glasses are gone, frackin_sweet?)



( ETA: ACK, massive; let's put the rest of David behind a cut, not that I'd be complaining IRL, of course. )