Pretty Cravings

Try something new.




I always wanted to try gif making. This is my very first attempt. I think Brendan Dean expresses my feelings about the experience perfectly.

A personal win

I'm working on a Vegas story for romancingmcshep. Knowing the title ahead of time is a big win for me. Usually I'm grappling with a title idea two minutes before posting.

So yesterday, I spent a little time creating a banner for it.

Five Things! The five things are totally up to you.

I chose five images that are currently on my phone.


_{click image to enlarge}

Talk about a current fannish project (fic, art, vid, crochet, funko pop village) (that you are creating or enjoying)

I try to keep up with the prompt challenges at sga_saturday but my current big thing is romancingmcshep.

A Valentine's Day's fest celebrating McShep happy endings? Oh my. Who would have thought? *coff* That would be my brain and the unashamed encouragement of friends.

Link to the 2024 Romancing McShep Fest.

Share a favorite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc.) and explain why you love it so much.

The relationship between Murderbot and ART. There is something so endearing, a little bit frightening, and old-married couple in their relationship that I had no choice but to love them.

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

I've been in fandom (Buffy) since 1999, in the not ready to come out of the woodwork way. But I'd found fanfic and waded in with delight. Found Livejournal shortly after that. That opened the door to finally peeping out from behind the corner and waving.

But LJ made changes...let's just say it was time to move to Dreamwidth. A slow move at the beginning - until LJ users were strong-armed into accepting the Russian Terms of Service. Ouch.

Stargate Atlantis was my first 'active' fandom. Still is. Ask me ten years from now, and I suspect my answer will be the same.

As for RL, I'm very conscious of keeping family separate from fandom. So, all I'll say about my RL is that I have eight grandchildren, and the oldest has just begun writing and illustrating her own stories. It will be fascinating to see where that leads.

I love my RL family, but fandom has added hugely to my life, and I'm so glad I found my way here. Got questions? Ask away.

In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

1. Continue to answer the sga_saturday monthly prompt challenge.

2. Continue to keep romancing_mcshep going (as long as there is interest)

3. Finish reading all of the Joe Leaphorn & Chee novels by Tony Hillerman

4. Do at least one story and hopefully more for whatif_au.

5. I'm holding this spot open for the goal I haven't thought of yet.

do the Fandom Wrap Challenge:


What were your top 5 fandoms for 2022 based on the amount of time you interacted with them?

1.Stargate Atlantis (the only one I actively participate in)
2.Teen Wolf
3. Star Trek: AOS
4. The Sentinel
5. Miscellaneous fic that catches my eye


What were your top 5 fandom spaces (Discord, Twitter, etc.) you experienced fandom in terms of time spent?
1. AO3 (not a day goes by with checking it out)
2. Dreamwidth (trying to post more regularly. Snowflake has been a huge help with that.)
3. Livejournal (occasionally crosspost and I'm involved in a couple of communities that are on both DW & LJ)
4. Tumblr (by the skin of my teeth)
5. Discord (very rarely there, but I do have an account so...#5

What are the top 5 things you did to contribute to fandom in terms of time? Did you write? Comment? Send positive energy into the universe? Create art?

1. Mod/Hosted romancingmcshep (and doing it again this year)
2. Created a couple of challenges for story_works
3. Wrote some fanfic
4. Left bunches of comments and kudos.
5. Did some art

What were your top 5 most appreciated fandom contributions? (i.e. in terms of likes, kudos, reblogs, comments, etc.)

1. I'm going to go with romancingmcshep for participation.
2. A Simple Sentinel/Guide Story had the most hits for 2022
3. Unguided has the most hits overall. (for all years)
4. Contributing to the sga_saturday prompt challenges.
5. Breakfast!

Okay, that one needs a little explanation. goddess47 and I try to do breakfast together once a week. This is when we knock around story ideas, discuss story challenges/prompts that have caught our eye, and sympathetically moan together over a story that's just not coming together. Currently, I'm the one doing most of the moaning. In general, we just egg each other on. *g*

Have a Top 5 List you'd like to share? By all means, jump on in!

Yeah, I got nothing. I don't generally think of things in a 'top-five' list. My list tends to run towards:

Laundry, dishes, walk, stare at the blinking cursor on my screen, swear, pour a glass of wine. Sigh and go find a lovely bit of fanfic to read.

But if you've got a top five to share jump on in.

set yourself some goals for the coming year:


Er...goals? Sure!

Let's start out with-



1. I've been very good about walking 10,000 steps a day since Christmas. It started from all that trotting about the stories doing Christmas shopping and I've kept it up. I'd really like to keep doing so.


2. Reaching my inkingitout word goal for the year. (I can hear you laughing from here you know)


3. Finding that balance between sitting at the computer to write and getting up off my ass to walk. Why is this so hard????

4. I have a couple of stories on AO3 that I've always wanted to write a sequel to. (and I say that every year. Crap.)

4. Fly a kite. I haven't done this since my kids were young and we made our own homemade kites. I'd like to see if it's as fun as I remember.

There's a new Romance challenge over on Story Works (I know because I just created it) *g*

You can check it out over here

Also for the Snowflake Challenge

In your own space, create a fanwork.

Creating a challenge to encourage fandom works counts, right?