Delightfully Useless

Okay, this is an odd bit of MFU dark!fic I wrote a while back. It's sort of a "Schrodinger's ficlet", in that I could waffle back and forth forever on whether it's any good... I hate those, because the only way to collapse the function is to post. o_O

Title: Useful [I am so imaginative, yeah? lol]
Summary: Illya is a supremely useful partner.
Notes: Gen, rated G. 200 words. Warning for dark!Napoleon.

( Here goes, then )

(I have completely given up on having my titles make sense.)

Um, this one... started as a Five Things To Do Instead Of Fixing The TARDIS. (Three found one of Jamie's half-finished socks in the wardrobe room and decided to learn how to knit. Yes, of course Jamie knit his own socks - not least because Frazier Hines has fantastic hands. Shusht. *g*) Then stuff happened.

Anyway.

Title: Madame Nostradamus, I Presume
Summary: This is a Third Doctor "how the Scarf got into the wardrobe room" story. Sort of.
Notes: 363 words. Gen, rated G. Season 10-11 hiatus of Classic Who.

( Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! )

So... dw_straybunnies had a special Brig!fic challenge this month, for obvious reasons. The challenge was "The Brigadier in other eras, or other eras with the Brigadier"; Two, Five, Six, Eight and/or their companions were preferred, since they seldom show up with the Brig in fic (though as usual in a Straybunnies challenge, pretty much anything was allowed).

I'm not even sure what happened, but this is what I wrote.

Title: Things That Did Not Happen in 2011
Stats: 300-ish words. Gen; worksafe (hey, it's me). Nine, Jamie, Zoe.
Warnings: Major character death. This is Brig!funeral fic, and not the nice saccharine sort I usually prefer.

Credits: Inspired by calapine's excellent "School Reunion" tag His Story, quoted herein, and by something lost_spook said and something Rusty did.

Also lost_spook made me a gorgeous banner for it, which is under the cut because this header is Long Enough Already.

( battling space thuggery, 1968-2011 )

Okay, so various people on my flist have been applying the Pirate Translator to their fanfic in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day. It's actually tomorrow here by now, but... eh, why not.

The pirate-ized version of One More Time is under the cut.

( Here it is... )

I'm also testing out LJ crossposting here. (I do find it vastly amusing that in fleeing crossposting from LJ we have all wound up crossposting to it. *g*)

So my very first published fanfic, Velocizompire Apocalypse, has apparently been nominated for the First Annual Gatefic Awards.

(No, I don't know for sure who nominated it... but I'd like to say "thank you" here, in the reasonably well-founded suspicion that the nominator will see the thanks. Would you anyone like to confirm or deny complicity, btw? *wink*)

Here's the point of this post: VZA is only posted on FFnet. I've recently been seeing some rumors about FFnet being even more evil than usual. Therefore I'd like to put VZA on Archive Of Our Own (that being apparently the most reliable and reputable archiving location) so I can send the awards team the new link when I confirm.

I am not on AO3. Does anyone seeing this have a spare AO3 invite code, or know of a place I could find one? I have till Sept 10 to confirm my nomination, so I'm in a tad bit of a hurry. I will send virtual cookies! ;-)

Thank you all very much for being my flist! :D *hugs you all*

So stunt_muppet was wondering on her journal how other people manage to write such little short fics - a whole story in 400 words or some such. She asked, "Short-fic-writers on my flist, how exactly do you do it? How do you find the perfect small slice of a scene to write about? How do you condense an idea into such a small space?"

Well, in a classic example of "the grass is greener", I've always wondered how other people can write so much in one story that ficathons with minimum requirements of 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 words are common! So I offered to do a ramble/analysis post about how my fics are so short. Here it is.

( I have no trouble cranking out the words in non-fiction, of course, so they are under here. )

LOL, now I find myself wanting to remix "Well, That's Just Ducky" and see if I could make it into a longfic! *g*

... but I'm really starting to wonder. The other night after I figured out (part of) the plot on this MacGyver/MFU story, our basement flooded; now that I've actually got some tentative dialogue down, the freezer died. (Well, hopefully temporarily - but it still means another Large Panic rearranging stuff and, you got it, MacGyvering things.)

So, being rather tired (understatement) and at a bit of an odd angle to reality right now, I'm wondering if this sort of thing happens to other MacGyver writers? (All two of you, yeah. *g*) Or is it just me?

*sigh*

Writer's Meme: Post a list of your top five favorite fics you've written, regardless of fandom or the reason you love them. This isn't about the BEST things you've written, but what you LOVE most. Snagged from primsong.

Agh, I can only pick five?! *whittles list ruthlessly*

*whittles more*

Okay, got it!


1: Venom Our Name Is. This is my only published piece featuring the Spider-Man villain Venom - I was working on an alternate origin story, because the character has such amazing potential if he's not tied down to being Complex Evil just so Spidey can be Morally Conflicted, and this is the tag.

I love it because it's adorable (if I say so myself) and because I got my two biggest compliments ever on it. One was "This actually makes me care about Venom a little" - which is exactly what I set out to do. The other referred to my note at the end thanking, among other people, Adam-Troy Castro for inspiration; it talked a bit about how cool he is, then said "You can tell who his fans are, and I see that a little bit in this." *dies of the awesome all over again*

2: The Hitchhiker's Guide to MacGyver was my first, and I still think my best, utter crackfic. It's the story people keep favoriting, almost two years after I wrote it, and the one that inadvertently started me on the long road to Wholigan-ness. (I have no idea why I was even reading Douglas Adams in the first place, but one of my reviewers mentioned his work on Who, and I began cautiously investigating... slippery slope, that. *big grin*)

3: Restless, my very first LJ fic and my second MFU piece, is still one of my favorites. I'm still just beginning to learn how to evoke emotions with sensory description, but I think I did well here.

4: Liaison Poetique, of course, was my birthday gift to my flist last year. It was originally inspired by my discovery that Ai, laurië lantar lassi surinen sounds really, really good in a Russian accent. *g*

(Well, it does. It'd sound even better with our David reciting it, instead of my half-baked impersonation, but there is not a recording.)

5: And In a Strange Land is my take on the oft-repeated "newbie!Illya makes a friend" story. Like my other entries on this list, it's short and adorable and a little bit different. ;-)


And that's five! There's also my remix-challenge fic coming up next week, which I'm rather glad isn't published yet... I had a hard enough time whittling this list down as it is! ♥