#sorry quipxotic

[quipxotic]

Has it honestly never occurred to Imogen that if she loses her powers she also loses her chief means of protecting the people she cares about? I mean, Bells Hells has incurred a lot of debts and pissed off a lot of powerful people, and none of that is going away regardless of what happens at the solstice.

Going off with Laudna and retiring to a farm to raise horses is a nice thought, but I can think of at least 3 powerful organizations who would likely work very hard to ensure they didn’t get to enjoy it for long. What happens then?

[sanguinarysanguinity]

tagged by @bendingthewillow​

You can tell a lot about a person by the kind of music they listen to. Put your music on shuffle, list the first 10 songs that come up, then tag 10 people.

Look, this will be simpler if I just tell you everything what’s on my mp3 player:

Hamilton OBC

In the Heights OBC

my Festivids vidsong (it’s an anon exchange, so no, I can’t tell you; yes, I listen to it on single-song repeat for an entire bus ride)

Much Ado About Nothing cast album (I think this was from the Tate and Tennant production? I had hopes of using one of the tracks as a vidsong. I’m still undecided, which doesn’t bode well for it)

Rediscovered Railway Mysteries and Other Stories (someone requested it for Holmestice a few rounds back, so I was listening to see if I wanted to offer it, but then I got to Cumberbatch doing the traditional gawdawful American accent that’s always in these things and I couldn’t go any farther)

Merrison & Williams The Devil’s Foot (aka the Bert Coules BBC radio production)

Rees & Logan Hound of the Baskervilles (written by Bert Coules)

four of the five Cult Holmes stories, read by Andrew Sachs and Hannah Gordon (I’m guessing I deleted the one I hated? It was probably the Kim Newman Moriarty story, because ugh)

Big Finish’s Sherlock Holmes: The Tangled Skein (which is what I’m currently listening to)

two podfics by @disheveledcurls

fifteen assorted eps of Cabin Pressure

the first two eps of John Finnemore’s Double Acts

an excerpt from Right Ho, Jeeves, where John Finnemore plays Wooster, Stephanie Cole plays Aunt Dahlia, and Geoffrey Whitehead plays Jeeves

a podcast about Katie Sandwina

the first episode of Alice Isn’t Dead

...and I dare you to deduce anything at all about me from that.

Please consider yourself tagged if you’d like to be tagged!

[amindamazed]

top 5/bottom 5

tagged by @margoleon​ and @sanguinarysanguinity​

Rules:  Tag the person who tagged you, always post the rules, answer the questions, and add the date!

What are your five most popular works? (starting with the most kudos)

all for Elementary

In Case of Emergency, Watson & Sherlock, 4700 words They turned left from the hallway into the glare of sunlight from the high windows, and gunfire scattered them. My most popular work by far, in kudos, bookmarks, and hits. Hurt/comfort with Joan injured in the hospital and Sherlock at her bedside; bonus Joan backstory plus Mary Watson and Emily Hankins.

Swayed, Watson & Sherlock, 1200 words When she pushed through the revolving door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, Sherlock was there. Instead of worry buried under scorn, she saw an echo of the haunted man who'd found Irene and blamed himself for what was done to her. Episode tag for 2x22, “Paint It Black”; there was lots of fan interest in what would happen next after that episode aired and lots of disappointment at what we didn’t get in the following episodes, both of which resulted in many of us writing and reading fic to fill the gap.

L’Ombre de ton ombre, Sherlock, 500 words On the first anniversary of the woman’s death, three jurisdictions deem her legally dead, and while that is patently meaningless for someone of her talents and resources, this time he knows what to look for, and there have been no political indications, no financial transactions, no evidence that she is anything but. An insert/alternate scene for @language-escapes La Chanson des vieux amants, and its popularity is 100% due to folks finding it linked as a related work from her amazing story, which you have to read before reading mine.

Outside the Box, Watson/Sherlock, 7500 words Things were different when Sherlock returned from London and different again once Joan moved back to the brownstone, but some changes require a little extra finesse. Friends to something more fic, focused more on the psychological/emotional transition than the physical (sorry). written for 2014 Winter Holmestice during early season 3, so AU for most of what followed after Sherlock returned from London.

[5 & 6 in kudo count are Doubts Don’t Deter Detectives II and III, which are collections of daily prompts for Watson’s Woes July Writing Prompts Challenge in 2014 and 2015, respectively. I still like a lot of what ended up there, but I don’t think they fit the intent of this meme. YMMV!]

For Science, written with @beanarie​, Watson & Sherlock & OFC, 10K words “We are going to have a baby,” she says. “For science.” Cracktastic mpreg babyfic (is that redundant?). A lot of it is silly fluff (and a bit of Joan/Marcus) but there are some serious/introspective installments as well.

What are your five least popular works? (starting with the fewest kudos)

Metamorphosis (switcheroo remix), When Night Is Falling, Camille/Petra, 150 words One fantasy is velvet bedding, fairy lights, and trapeze lovers dancing on air. A short remix of @sanguinarysanguinity‘s vid, Glitter in the Air. I doubt either work makes sense if you haven’t seen the movie, but hey the vid is only 51 seconds and this fic 150 words, so what have you got to lose?

Finding Jack Harkness, Torchwood, Jack Harkness & Original Jack Harkness, 1500 words He'd usurped the man's identity originally because he was dead in another city, and his description was a good match. My first fic! Originally posted in a Torchwood LJ community and added to AO3 years later. It is amusing in retrospect to see that I was drawn in by questions about timelines that had snagged my attention: how many times had Jack passed through WWII, and what did his namesake come to mean to him?

Something About Seeing and Being Seen (Through a Glass Darkly remix), Elementary, Joan/Ms Hudson; Ms Hudson/OFC, 3200 words There are things Joan doesn't want to think about. There are other things Joan doesn't know how to think about. Marthe helps her with both. A remix of @phoenixfalls Your Want Is Bigger Than You; the original character in my fic comes from that story. In addition to the relationships, the fic also explores Joan’s experience at the end of season 2 and during the time Sherlock is in London.

The Little Things, Mary Russell - Laurie R. King, Mary Russell & John Watson, 365 words "Oh, go on and open it Mary, you're as bad as he is sometimes. It's a present, not an exercise in deduction." I wrote one non-Elementary work for the 2015 July Writing Prompts and posted it separately from the rest of Doubts Don’t Deter Detectives III. I read King’s series as chock full of unreliable narrators, and I like to explore that in fic, here reframing Mary’s immature assessment of Watson.

The Story of My Life (The Old Regrets Never Die remix), Elementary, Joan Watson, 800 words It’s possible that Jem would have been killed whether I was there to complicate Le Millieu’s plans or not. (I’ll never know if Aaron Colville would have lived (and the women his mother killed, after) if another doctor had stood up to Fleming.) It still stands that he’s now the last person who died because of me. I don’t even know his full name. A remix of @beanarie‘s Turn the Page. Another post-season-two exploration, using b’s AU in which Kitty was Joan’s student, not Sherlock’s. This is a bitter, brittle Joan who knows she can’t rely on anyone, especially herself, to keep others safe. Good times!

I can’t remember now who’s done this already, sorry! I’ll tag @beanarie, @language-escapes, @nairobiwonders, @quipxotic, @time-converges, @joaneuglassiawatson

17 august 2017

[paradoxymora]

Thank you to @circular-time, @the-macra, @quipxotic, @therothwoman, @anotheruserwithnoname, and @elden-12 for the First Doctor audio recs.

I ended up getting Quinnis, The Rocket Men, Return of the Rocket Men, The Library of Alexandria (sorry, Hayley, I just HAVE to hear where memelord Susan came from), and the Sara Kingdom and Oliver Harper trilogies.

[quipxotic]

I’ve pretty much given up on sitting down while watching The Expanse this season. Everything’s too stressful and I’ve too much nervous energy, might as well put on my sneakers and pace.

Oh yeah and talk back to the TV.

[quipxotic]

Just wrapping up this weekend’s writing. So far, I’ve written drabbles for four of the six stories of “The Legacy of Time:”

“Lies in Ruins” by James Goss is split between the River Song and Time War Drabbles;

“The Split Infinitive” by John Dorney is in the Seventh Doctor Drabbles;

“The Sacrifice of Jo Grant” by Guy Adams is split between the UNIT and Third Doctor Drabbles;

And “Relative Time” by Matt Fitton is in the Fifth Doctor Drabbles.

There’s only “The Avenues of Possibility” by Jonathan Morris and “Collision Course” by Guy Adams left. But since they’re (maybe) my least favorite audios of the set, they can wait until next week.

[sanguinarysanguinity]

Fic-Writer / Vid-Maker Meme

Tagged by @educatedinyellow and @gailbsanders, thank you!

Author/Vidder Name: sanguinity

Fandoms You Write For: Lately it’s mostly book!verse Hornblower and ACD!Holmes (although the ACD!Holmes is largely behind the scenes with a long-form WIP that I’ve been focusing on). I also write for assorted small Holmesian fandoms as the whim or prompts take me, and I used to write fairly prolifically for Elementary, before that show wore me into the ground with how persistently they don’t care about Joan Watson. I’ve written a fair bit of Strange Empire, some Doctor Who / Torchwood, and quite a few one-offs in random fandoms, from the Oz books to Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Fandoms I Vid For: Mostly one-offs or small batches that overlap with the fandoms I write for: Holmesian multiverse, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, plus a number of rarer Festivids-qualifying fandoms like The Middleman or Noah’s Arc. 

Where You Post Fic: Most of it is on AO3, excepting some three-sentence and five-sentence fics that I’ve never collected. 

Where You Post Vids: Variously Vimeo, YouTube, and DailyMotion, depending on who threw a fit about what copyrighted music the week I posted it, but all my vids are listed at AO3.

Most Popular One-Shot: “The Sincerity of Dust,” a BBC Sherlock Mystrade flash-fic I banged out one morning and which then went on to eat Cleveland. It has 1400 kudos and is working on 14,000 hits. Its nearest rival is “Score: Q to 12,″ an Elementary flash-fic featuring Sherlock and Joan playing Calvinscrabble, which performed modestly on AO3 but cleaned up on tumblr to the tune of 1700 notes.

Most Popular Multi-Chapter Story: “Holocene Park,” an Elementary case fic featuring dinosaurs under the streets of New York City. If I’m remembered in the Elementary fandom for anything, it’s probably for this or Calvinscrabble.

Most Popular Vid: “Something Good (Will Come From That),” my Holmes/Watson multiverse vid. It has 10K plays, the AO3 page has 2.5K hits, and the tumblr page has almost 800 notes. It escaped my corner of pseudonym-based AO3-centric fandom and has made the rounds of the Sherlockian scions on Facebook, as well as being rec’d on non-fannish websites in French, German, and Japanese. For a little while there it was making me anxious with how popular it got -- at the height of its popularity, I was worrying my mom was going to email it to me. After it hit it big I almost completely stopped making things for a while, because I was pretty sure that nothing else I made would be even half that good ever again. Happily, that turned out to be a stupid reason to not make things, and so I started making things again.

Favorite Story You Wrote/Vid You Made: Yeah, sorry, no, my brain burns out on “favorite” questions, especially ones that have no criteria. I’ll just refer you to my Fic/Vid Speed-Dating Score Card, which can be construed as a list of my favorite works on various axes, and is still fairly accurate despite being a year old. (Scariest nowadays is probably “Tea for Two,” a Moriarty-centric story from this last round of Holmestice.)

Story You Were Nervous to Post: “Any Service Required,” which is dark Bush/Hornblower porn. I always feel hideously exposed when publishing porn -- I’m nervous about posting it even in the best of cases. But what with this being dark-fic, I was half-expecting the self-appointed morals police who get prescriptive about “healthy” relationships to show up and make a stink. Or along similar lines, I was fearing that followers who are used to a certain kind of thing from me will look at this one, think it base trash, and lose respect for me over it. I’m happy to say that nothing like that has happened so far, and while readership has been light, I’m fine with that: I’d rather a story have a small readership who is genuinely into it than a large readership who isn’t, and I’d like to believe that this story’s small readership is mostly due to people taking a look at the tags and making good decisions about the kind of thing they enjoy reading. 

How Do You Choose Your Titles: BY ANY MEANS I CAN MAKE WORK. My preference is to grab a meaningful phrase from the text, but I’ll also use quotes and popular phrases, sometimes straight-up and sometimes with a twist, if it seems a decent fit for the story. Ideally, a title will speak to some deeper truth about the story, but when push comes to shove, I’ll settle for a title that is short, clean, and memorable: basically, anything that I and others can remember without having to look it up all the damn time. (This is my main problem with people using lines of poetry or song lyrics as titles: they tend to register in my brain as generic word salad, and in many cases I couldn’t say without looking it up what the title actually was, let alone what it had to do with the story.)

Do You Outline: For long or complex stories, sure, yes. If there are many scenes or multiple chapters, I tend to jot down a few lines listing out the succession of scenes or chapters; for “The Next World,” whose main body is a long and rambly conversation, I had an outline that listed out every twist and turn of that convo. The outline for “Langstroth on Bees” (WIP, currently 58K) is a monster of a thing, listing out the internal timeline (five years of current action plus another ten of backstory), various promises I’ve made that I need to deliver on, assorted events that I want to remember to include, and rough ideas about where chapter breaks should maybe fall. Given that I’ve been working on that story for five years now, often with breaks from it of nearly a year, that outline has saved my ass. I guarantee you that without it, I would have picked up this story at some point, tried to remember where I was going with it, come up with nothing much, and shelved it permanently. If anything, I really should outline more often -- I have a few long-standing drafts in my WIP folder that I just... don’t remember where I was going with that. I remember that I did have a destination in mind, yes, but what exactly? WHO KNOWS. Btw, my outlines are living documents -- I revise them often, as my understanding of the story develops. In fact, revising the outline is one of many tools for understanding where a story is going and what is still needed to bring it together.

How many of your fanworks are…

Complete: 92 stories or story collections (I have a few AO3 “stories” that are actually collected ficlets from tumblr or Sherlock60), and 26 vids and vidlets, 

In-Progress: Nothing published to AO3 -- it makes me crazy to have a partially-published WIP. My drafts folder has 36 partially completed stories in it, and there are probably a half-dozen vids that I started but haven’t finished.

Coming Soon: Four? For various values of “coming soon.” I have two Hornblower stories that are mostly done (one for the Tegmore verse and another for the Kraken verse), and I’ve been working steadily on “Langstroth on Bees” in the hopes that I’ll finish it this year. And I’m signed up for Remix Revival -- whatever I do for that will probably be the very-most-next thing.

Do You Accept Prompts: Yes! Although I have only a 1/3 to 1/2 completion rate on prompts -- I do hope that no one minds that too terribly! But I’ll actively solicit prompts from time to time -- to celebrate something, or if I’m having a shit day and want to turn it around -- and some of my best stuff has come from prompts people have given me. I never ever guarantee filling them (see my above mentioned completion rate), but if someone wants to prompt me something, my ask box is open. Even if the prompt never gets filled, I still get a warm flutter of “They want to play with me!” from it.

Upcoming Story You Are Most Excited to Write: “Langstroth on Bees,” a 58K-and-counting Holmes/Watson retirement fic that I’ve been working for five years. I added a solid 13K to it this month, and have maybe 20K left to go -- I’m hope-hope-hoping to have it done this year. But I’ve gotten far enough into it that “Langstroth” has finally begun overlapping the territory covered in “From Allegany,” and by the end of this chapter I’ll have passed it entirely. Then I’ll be in unwritten territory, wheee! (Speaking of titles, I never really intended to call this thing “Langstroth on Bees” -- that’s just a working title for my drafts folder. But enough of you now know it by that name that I think I’m going to have to stick with it? So I’m desperately trying to figure out how to justify it. ONE OF MANY THINGS TO DO IN THIS DRAFT.)

Tag Five Fanfic Authors to Answer These Questions As Well: @beanarie @quipxotic @phoenixfalls @xserpx @amindamazed And of course anyone else who wants to play!

[sanguinarysanguinity]

@quipxotic replied to your post: FedEx just delivered what appears to be a $5500...

Holy shit! I can’t even conceive of having enough disposable income to buy a bag (A. BAG!) that costs that much. (An itty, bitty bag at that.) No wonder you’re stressing.

I know, right? I opened the box, saw that the contents were apparently from Chanel, saw that the contents apparently retailed for $5K, and... my brain stopped working. Like, what? How? What could possible be worth $5K about a handbag?

(My car is not worth $5K, but it has A/C, which this handbag does not, and it also lets me go cool places, which this handbag does not, and visit with friends, which this handbag does not, AND SO ON AND SO FORTH.)

I just... I don’t get it.

@ancientreader replied to your post: FedEx just delivered what appears to be a $5500...

“inexorable consumer of luxury goods” HE IS THE JUGGERNAUT OF THE BLACK AMEX CARD! FEAR HIM!

HE DID IN FACT PAY WITH AMERICAN EXPRESS.

I had a look at his charitable foundation: everything that ought to be a link is not a link. (They’re not dead links; they do not exist. “Contact”, “About”, etc. -- there are no hyperlinks on any of that.) And the “facebook” and “twitter” kinds of links just go to facebook’s homepage, twitter’s homepage... My co-worker is not convinced the foundation even exists. 

And his Twitter is just pictures of him with celebrities. (Well, I assume they’re celebrities from the way they’re posed. My workmate recognized one of them, but neither of us recognized the rest.) 

I know it is poor form to judge strangers over the internet, but... I am not particularly impressed.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, dammit, that was my one shot at leading someone into a life of crime!

So sorry to disappoint! Maybe you’ll get another shot with someone else someday! Here’s hoping!