Louise Holds a Handful of Rain

Spurred by the Russian user agreement, I finally migrated over to Dreamwidth and will probably be deleting my LJ soon (sniffle), once I can bring myself to pull the trigger.

I rarely post on here, but I hate to lose access to what all of you are doing and I really love and treasure the time I spent on this platform, the access to friends and other fans, and I still think it was a glorious platform to discuss media and passions and to be a fan.

I'm itsallovernow on Dreamwidth: itsallovernow so if you're over there, let me know!

My Yuletide story:

Sightlines and Hemlines (2037 words) by Thassalia
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Amelia Peabody - Elizabeth Peters
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Amelia Peabody Emerson/Radcliffe Emerson, Ramses Emerson/Nefret Forth Emerson
Characters: Nefret Forth Emerson, Ramses Emerson, Amelia Peabody Emerson
Summary:

Holidays have come to mean an adjustment in perspective.

***

I've had a tough time focusing on anything, and while I love these books, it was a struggle to find a story in them that needed telling. But I got possibly the most extensive, thoughtful feedback ever from the recipient so I dearly hope that it did, in fact, make her happy!

I received this lovely story for Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Cold Town, which is one of the few vampire stories that I really dig, with a really great protaganist and a genuinely sexy love interest.

On the Road to Love (1667 words) by Taste_of_Suburbia
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown - Holly Black
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aidan/Tana Bach/Gavriel (Coldtown)
Characters: Tana Bach, Aidan (Coldest), Gavriel (Coldest)
Additional Tags: Romance, Angst, Fluff, Threesome - F/M/M, Pre-Book(s), Post-Book(s), Set during book, Family, Friendship, Families of Choice, Human/Vampire Relationship, Character Study, Pre-Slash, Yuletide, Misses Clause Challenge
Summary:

“There’s a party I snagged next Friday.”

One thing Tana’s learned: there’s always a party.

Mostly, I feel like I HAVE to post here when I post fic. Like, post here or it didn't happen. Maybe I just like the nostalgic comfort of the platform and the lovely people I met here.  Basically, because rubberneck did all the heavy lifting for Frog in a Blender, I wanted to write her a present to say thank you. And it got away from me.

There's a Dearth of Poetry About Spies (17786 words) by Thassalia
Fandom: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Rating: Explicit
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Bruce Banner & Tony Stark, Bruce Banner & Clint Barton
Characters: Natasha Romanov, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Tony Stark
Additional Tags: Post-Iron Man 3, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Spies, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Supposed to be a sex romp through Europe but it got away from me, Sex is totally a plot
Summary: "It’s truly a fantasy, and one she could spin, for him, but spies don’t work like that -- in breathless, charged teams. They need steady hands, even heart rates. And if she were somewhere she thought she’d get caught she’d just leave, or lie. Eliminate the threat one way or another."

Spies, and control, and figuring out how to see each other clearly. Bruce and Natasha fail at the sex romp through Europe. Well, they fail at the romping. Starts mid-IM3, continues until AoU but isn't particularly compliant.

So a few months ago, I emailed the Hussies, a little desperate.  "I don't know what to do...I'm having all these FEELINGS after Age of Ultron.  How is that NOW I'm having Marvel/Avengers feelings, fannish, obsessive feelings...and about a pairing that fandom seems to hate?"

And then I gushingly broke down the deep, obsessive need to find and read ALL or ANY thing that was Natasha Romanoff/Bruce Banner because kick-ass, super smart, super competent, super controlled female character and brilliant, slightly unstable scientist who could destroy everything around him with his own control issues? It did, in retrospect, really seem like my thing... And it turned out that it was also rubberneck's thing, even though we both kind of looked at how it played on in AoU, shaking our head's and thought, "We can do better."

So we slung it back and forth across time-zones for six dizzy, frantic weeks until we finished a draft and had a timeout and inquired about how one did fandom in this speedy social media age.  Six weeks. 70,000 words, and I won't lie, Feldman is as always the brains of the operation, and the competencies, and the effortlessness and the sheer, solid work. If there's a phrase that catches the eye and ear, odds are she wrote it. If there's plot that makes sense, she drove it.

But this story has ended up being one of the things I'm most proud of being a part of, because it was unexpected, and kind of needed at a tough time in my life, and because writing with rubberneck is truly one of great joys of my life.

Frog in a Blender (70287 words) by Thassalia, feldman
Chapters: 15/15
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov
Characters: Natasha Romanov, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, Thor (Marvel), Maria Hill, Nick Fury
Additional Tags: Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Red Room, Team Dynamics, Super Soldier Serum, Identity Issues
Summary:

When she notices Banner's attention she doesn’t discourage it, because he lives a similar lie. Pretend this is safe, pretend he’s containable, pretend that unchecked aggression doesn’t tend toward slaughter. She can give him that much, as easily as letting him turn her foot over gently in his warm hands and build a hypothesis that she’d rather he left alone.

I've finally decided to set up a fannish Tumblr since I couldn't help myself any more: thassalia.tumblr.com.

If you're over there, let me know!

So as feldman and I continue to bask in our mutual adoration, and write this thing that I think is really fucking good (and may have a very limited audience, but fuck it, we're delighted), I've started thinking about archiving my Farscape stuff, and the sundries, up on AO3. Which is intimidating, not only because of the need to find it on here, on Leviathan, on wherever, format it, post it, proof it, etc. But also because, despite a vast amount of NOT WRITING that I've been doing, I'm a better writer now, or probably, I've got more confidence in my ability to write about something other than physical and emotional boning, and I'm a little...embarrassed, I guess, about the indulgences I allowed myself in a lot of those pieces.

So, the questions, for those of you who have undertaken the archiving process:
a) Worth it?
b) How hard is it - formatting-wise?
c) Did you do another editing pass? Did you retool the stories, or just archive them as is?

All thoughts are appreciated!

So we went to see Age of Ultron, and after countless movies, I finally caught the fannish bug again, and I tried to dive into AO3, and (briefly, terrifyingly) tried to understand how fandom worked on Tumblr (and got immediately turned off by how fucking easy it is to be loathsome as well as joyous, which I don't remember being as prevalent on LJ, but YMMV, and a small fandom, and maybe we just gossiped and trashed-talked the civilized way - to each other, and via IM.) But I proposed my unpopular fannish opinion to the Hussies, and sometimes, the universe knows when you need a win, and needless to say "BAM, new fandom" and swoony sigh, writing with one of my all-time favorite writers and humans rubberneck, and...it's such an incredible rush, such a high to have both that obsessive love, but more, a place to put it and a story that has far surpassed the obsession itself in terms of what I want from the fannishness.

I want THIS story, I want to keep writing it, and I keep thinking about it, anticipating what will come next with this giddiness and inspiration that I had forgotten was possible. And at the point when I was just kind of bursting with this joy, when I had to post SOMETHING about it, I checked into LJ to find that my partner in crime had hit a similar point: I had thinky thoughts about Age of Ultron...

Fandom, I can't even. You've given me some of the best things in my life.

But I'm staying off of Tumblr! (Except for the GIFs. I can live with the GIFs).

My dad had a massive stroke about 12 years ago which he survived. Various ailments have had him in and out of the hospital periodically since then, but nothing life-threatening. The Saturday before the Super Bowl, my stepmother called and said he'd had a bad nosebleed and had been admitted. Since then, he's suffered incidents of low blood pressure which has lead to further stroke activity, and ultimately we've made the agonizing decision to transfer him to in-patient hospice where he will either pass away or recover enough to be sent to a full-time nursing or care facility. Either is a miserable end to a largely full and complicated life. But he's pretty mellow right now. He sleeps a lot, eats very little, and recognizes about half of his visitors. He can have his dog when he wants, chocolate for every meal, and the undivided attention of those who love him because he's only "present" for about 20 minutes at a time.

My grief is something thick, and heavy, and awful. I can put this whole feeling behind me for hours, sometimes days at a time until it slams back into me that the father I knew, even the one I'd come to know again post stroke - the difficult, selfish, needy, desperate man who still had a sense of humor, who sometimes valued cool over kind, but also loved with a big, messy effort - is not coming back. That I may lose him completely very soon. That the loss is more likely than not. It's awful. It's life. It's terribly unfair.

And I want to write, but I don't want to write about this. However, the grief is providing this grey, odorous blanket over my ability to even come up with ideas, topics, anything.

So I reach out to this community with a request - the same one I always seem to come to everyone with: Give me a prompt, a topic, a sentence, a meme, a character or an idea. Point me in a direction, even if it's the wrong direction. I'll write about fandom, about fans, about characters, about myself. I'll write fic, I'll write fiction, but I need direction.

We've been watching Agent Carter with glee, The Blacklist with embarrassed pleasure (yes, it's sort of terrible, but it's so...watchable). I'm a season and a half into The Good Wife. I've been reading tons of fluffy romance, very little of substance, but I'd attempt book fandom if I know it. We're caught up on Doctor Who, and yes, I've seen Jupiter Ascending. I didn't make it in time to sign up for Yuletide this year, so I'm also happy to look at small fandoms or fill in wishes from wishlists.

I have finally been at home for more than five days, a rarity in the past three months, and am itching to do some writing. However, my past promises to write keep getting broken, so I offer a meme stolen from everyone:

Give me a character and I will tell you...

* How I feel about this character
* All the people I ship romantically with this character
* My non-romantic OTP for this character
* My unpopular opinion about this character
* One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.
* Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon

I am woefully out of touch with most of fandom, but odds are I still have opinions on characters I only know peripherally:)

Saturday and Sunday was the LA Times Festival of Books, and while mostly we ambled around not stopping much of anywhere due to a friend's new dog who is learning all about WALKING WHERE THE PEOPLES ARE OMG! I was able to get a ticket to Rainbow Rowell's signing, where I spent $40 on two hardbacks I owned digitally (which were totally worth it - somehow, reading Fangirl in hardback made me love it even more) and got to, however briefly, interact with the completely delightful Ms. Rowell. The booth hosting the signing had printed on the tickets that there would be NO POSED PICTURES, something that was immediately thrown to the winds when RR declared that she'd love to take photos with her fans.

I may have cried when she signed "Eleanor and Park", I won't lie. There was something so delightful about seeing all of these fangirls of all ages (mostly teens and early 20s, but not exclusively) with their shirts and their enthusiasm, and just their general...taking up presence in the worldness that made me nearly as weepy.

I also saw a stunningly beautiful young Muslim woman wearing jeans, a TARDIS t-shirt, boots, and a hijab carrying a copy of "Fangirl". Only the very basics of good manners kept me from asking if I could take her photos.

I...there aren't really adequate words for me to express how I feel about this movie even being a movie, let alone this sort of lush romanticism that's getting sprinkled around it like it's this sappy, genial period piece of a thing. And maybe the movie will be, but... I LOVE this book. I love it's excesses and time travel and over-writing and philosophizing and WINTER. I love all of it's wonderful, bruising absurdity, and love, and epicness and I cannot on any level imagine what persuaded them to try and film it when the wonder of it is getting lost in the chill, snowy paradise of fin-de-siecle New York and a new age that doesn't exist.

So, I will undoubtedly force M. to go see it with me because I lack all willpower and because while he is fair too tall, there's something insane enough in Russell Crowe's face that he will make a fine Pearly Soames.

So, thoughts? Other fans of this book? Are you going to go see it? Are you dreading it? Excited? Both?