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I signed up very spur of the momentishly for hAPPy Flash Exchange, and my gift was a perfect little Biggles & Co tag, which I loved!

Accounts May Differ by

sheron (gen, 676 wds)
In which Biggles (&Co) are debriefed on the events of the book by a long-suffering Raymond. Funny and delightful with great character voices. (How do you explain the homemade cake to your boss, anyway?)

I am currently suffering FOMO about Fic in a Box but also suspect that I would be much happier if I do not sign up for a 10K exchange and instead do one of the fall exchanges like Trick or Treat or Jump Scare if I need a deadline to keep me motivated. I have also glommed onto the prompts from

no_true_pair and Whumptember, and want to write a few of those, too.

A couple of different exchanges had author reveals this week!

I wasn't signed up for Case Fic, but I participated as a pinch hitter with this:

The Jewel Bug Affair (Babylon 5, 9K, Ivanova & Garibaldi + others)

I had been eyeing this request back when I had considered signing up, so when it came up for PH, I had to jump on it. One of the recipient's requests was for a canon divergent AU in which Garibaldi and Ivanova quit the military and run a detective agency together, so that's what this is, and I had a fun time with alien worldbuilding and writing characters I don't normally write much.

Slight fic spoilers

The thing that made the idea of it click into place was deciding to set it at the start of season five, when everyone is dealing (or not-dealing) with massive trauma from the war. I don't really think that I've seen fic deal with that too much - it's not completely nonexistent, but a lot of the fic, even if it's set around that time, is focused on something else (AU fixes of character deaths, say) as opposed to just letting the human characters bounce off each other while they're all really messed up. And building a casefic plot that involved alien cultures and worldbuilding was a good time, too.

And there was also Id Pro Quo earlier this week, where I wrote:

Silken (Babylon 5, 2900 wds, Londo/G'Kar, explicit)
This was one of those neat bits of exchange synchronicity when I wrote something I 100% would not have written without having my recipient prompt it, but once I got into it, I had a great iddy time with it.

Details

Basically they had a fairly specific scenario for G'Kar being triggered by past, Centauri-related trauma during sex with Londo, and *especially* if it was related to the Centauri stereotype of Narn as sexually aggressive beasts. I actually wrote two versions of this - the original was shorter and simply involved G'Kar unexpectedly freaking out about being tied up. But I wasn't happy with it, because it felt much more true to character and satisfying - also *way* harder to write - if what he reacts to is actually roleplaying being a sexual aggressor in a kink scenario. And in the end I was very satisfied with it, even though I think I wouldn't have tackled this at all if I hadn't had the request to give me the impetus to write it. "Topping character dissociates into a panic attack over trauma related to topping" isn't something I've written before in any fandom, but it felt like a scenario that worked really well for them, and I was thoroughly happy with how it came out!

* There's a bird living in the greenhouse, a juvenile junco. When I first found it in there a couple of weeks ago, which made it go into a flapping frenzy, I thought it had gotten trapped by accident - it's happened before! - and opened the door so it could get out. The second time, I thought I just hadn't left the door open long enough and it had hidden somewhere else. The third time, I actually saw it leave, so by the fourth time, I figured it actually knew how to get in and out, and it was flapping around because it freaked out every time I'd come in. Anyway, it's been a couple of weeks and I saw it again today - at this point I'm leaving one of the vents open for it, and otherwise letting it do its own thing and leaving if I notice it's in there, since it panics whenever I come in. As I said to Orion today, it's the bird's greenhouse now, I guess. (Hopefully it's eating the aphids, and that it isn't whatever has been eating my beans.)

* We also have a fox. We've seen it several times, most recently tonight around dusk, going back and forth in the yard and presumably eating the voles that have been eating my garden.

Photo from a few days ago. Orion posted a video of it on Facebook.

( More under the cut )

I have been having a bit of a thing lately for reading older books, trying to provide myself a balanced diet of different wordcraft. I've bounced off a few of these (will try again later, the mood wasn't right) but this one was a fun, fast read.

.... I will also admit that I have had a lifelong difficulty remembering the difference between Paradise Lost by John Milton, and Lost Horizon by James Hilton. Yes, I know they are COMPLETELY different things and like 300 years apart, but somehow my brain conflated them in a major way, and even writing this post, I kept having to check that I hadn't put down the wrong J. *ilton.

Anyway, Lost Horizon is an adventure novel from the 1930s that is basically a heavy influence on (and maybe the originator of, or at least the first really famous one of) the entire sub-subgenre of Westerners discovering weird mystical stuff in Tibet. It's also the origin of Shangri-La, which is the mysterious monastery in the book. A group of travelers crash-land in the mountains and find themselves trapped in a remote valley among friendly yet weird locals who are clearly hiding something from them.

The entire Biggles fandom needs to know that this book is Extremely Biggles, to a point where I suspect it was probably an influence on Johns's early non-WWI Biggles books (along with the rest of the pulp fiction ecosystem of the 1930s - but this book in particular, I think). As well as the plane crash and weird happenings at the monastery, the scenery and mountain descriptions are very vivid and interesting.

The main events of the book are told as a story within a story, but I had an unusual reading experience brought on by the copy I had - and it's not some random download, I bought it off Amazon! - not having the frame story, just the inner story, which in the original book is being related secondhand as past events. I actually think I liked it better this way, partly because the story is more immediate and less artificial when it's happening "now," but also, it changes the tone/theme in an interesting way which I'll get into under the cut.

( Spoilers follow )

So basically - I enjoyed this a lot, definitely recommend if you like books of the era and you're looking for a kind of Biggles-like read with some interesting philosophical questions on the side.

Content warnings

I mean, you can guess what you're going to get from the nature of the book, though it was actually better than I was expecting? There are also a few racial slurs.

From the other day, the ficlets resulting from character prompts + rolls of my "body parts" die.

closeup on a large white die (singular of dice) displaying the names of body parts: left hand, right leg, full body, etc

I had great fun with this; thank you to everyone for leaving prompts! I'll copy these over to Tumblr too when I get a chance.

Biggles

1. Biggles, Algy, Ginger + Right Foot
2. Fritz & Erich + Left Arm
3. Algy & Ginger + Right Foot
4. Biggles & Erich + Full Body

Agent Carter

1. Peggy, Jack, Daniel + Head
2. Peggy & Rose + Left Arm

Murderbot

1. Murderbot & Gurathin + Head
2. Any Sanctuary Moon Character + Stomach
3. Ratthi + Right Arm

Babylon 5

1. Ivanova + Left Leg
2. Londo & G'Kar + Stomach
3. Garibaldi + Head

How is it August?

July was a busy, active month! I turned 50, which feels less weird than turning 40 did. I went to my cousin's wedding, which was on the land where my grandparents homesteaded in the 1960s, now owned by another cousin and her husband, who use it as the base of their charter aviation business. They have five or six kids, the oldest of whom has a baby (so my younger cousin is a grandma, which is the part I'm having trouble with, honestly).

Anyway, they had a really lovely setup at the top of a hill on the property, with a rustic arch made of driftwood and flowers that had mountains and forest in the background. The ceremony and wedding party made a gorgeous image framed against it. I didn't really want to post photos of them, so I took a photo of just the arch, which unfortunately didn't turn out all that great, but you get the idea.

It was a cloudy day with intermittent light rain, but not enough to spoil the ceremony, which was outdoors. Everyone just toughed it out, and they obviously had a great time.

After that, I spent several days down on the coast of the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage.

a sweeping expanse of mostly grass, with mountains and cloudy/sunny sky in the background

( Lots more travel photos under the cut )

Continuing to write up books I've read this past month - In the Frame is the last of the Dick Francis books that I picked up at the used bookstore and read on or just after my trip. After all these years, I'm still running into books of his that I've never heard of at all, like this one, even though it's one of his earlier ones (early 70s).

The hero is a professional painter (of horses, obviously) who is investigating his cousin's wife's death after the police suspect his cousin and don't really look into it beyond that. This sends him running all over Australia and New Zealand, a.k.a. Dick Francis has recently been to Australia and New Zealand, and is going to tell you aaaallllll about it. But I really enjoyed it; his descriptions are vivid, and the hero gets around to lots of interesting places.

I don't know that I really have a lot to say about this one: it's solid Dick Francis, and this isn't one of the ones with a particularly mysterious mystery, but what's going on is interesting. For once, one of Dick Francis's protagonists knows there's someone trying to kill him and tries to sensibly avoid being caught - this is something that has driven me up the wall in a couple of his books, including one of the last ones I wrote up, in which the hero knows there's someone after him, but goes on about his usual routine and keeps spending the night at his own house, until! Surprise! Someone jumps him! In this case, though, once the hero realizes his investigations have gotten the attention of his targets, he starts actually going to some fairly extensive lengths to avoid being counter-detected, such as using assumed names and heading off to new towns at the drop of a hat.

(Though I was annoyed by this book pulling the trick of telling you that the hero had talked to people or found clues, but not telling you what it was that he said or talked to or saw until the resolution; I really hate that.)

This is maybe the only Dick Francis I've read in which I happen to know a lot about the thing the book was about - painting, in this case - so to me the detailed descriptions of paint colors and pigments and techniques were a little OTT in the way of "I have researched this thing, let me tell you all about it!" Which made me wonder if his books are always like that and I just don't usually notice because I don't know much about whatever the book is about (horse racing, glassblowing, toymaking, etc) and I like being told about it.

Anyway: another solid Francis, very Dick Francis and very enjoyable.

The Id Pro Quo exchange revealed earlier this week, and I got two lovely gifts!

Mountain Rescue - Biggles, gen, 2400 wds

Delightful canon-compliant gen, absolutely perfect character voices and vivid WEJ-esque descriptions (the mountain setting is so well done, it absolutely feels like a scene from the books), and the low-key but intense emotional tone is also really well handled. I enjoyed it immensely.

A Door Once Opened - Babylon 5, Londo/G'Kar (on the mild, more gennish/pre-slash end), 2700 wds

Lovely dream-sharing/nightmare-sharing fic with emotional h/c and beautiful little cultural/character touches and comfort. Entirely my thing all the way around.

I highly recommend both my gifts!

---

I haven't read much in the collection yet, but I was UTTERLY charmed by this newest entry in the "werewolf Erich" Biggles AU 'verse:

Maybe it's more than the moon (Biggles/EvS, 12K)

This is simultaneously a) an insightful look at werewolf culture that never contradicts my original fic while also providing a bunch of new details, b) a delicately drawn get-together fic, and c) an absolutely hilarious roommate comedy in which Biggles's flatmates and neighbors attempt to cope with a very large wolf in a not actually that small flat (but small for four people and a wolf) who occasionally turns into a very naked Erich von Stalhein. (Also excellent appearances by Fritz as well!) This is sweet and funny, and a very worthy addition to the Von Stahlwolf AU.

I really enjoyed this one, in large part because of the demon's POV. Penric and Des are helping a young demon acclimate to its new host, and we get about a third of the book from the POV of the demon, including the way that its different personalities left over from its past hosts relate to each other, and the way it thinks of itself and its new host. I don't think we've seen this in the series before (I don't recall that we've ever had demon POV at all before, including Des's) so that was a fun, different treat, especially since the demon was so sweet and so earnestly wanting to do well by its various hosts.

( A few spoilers )

A few years ago, when I was visiting

magistrate in San Francisco, I bought this die at the Pirate Store.

I always thought it'd be fun to use it in h/c somehow. So let's try something which may or may not work.

Leave me a comment with two (or more) characters from one of my current fandoms. I'll roll the die to generate a body part and write at least 3 sentences of h/c with those characters and an injury or other issue with that body part.

Biggles, Babylon 5, or Murderbot TV gives you the best shot at actually getting it written, since those are the things I'm currently writing for. If there's something else you know I've written in the past, it's worth asking but I might not be able to do it. You can also give me a request for original characters if you want, e.g. "a fox shifter in a trap and a medieval hunter."

Results may be anywhere from high angst to fluff to crack depending on the particular combo.

One thing this fandom really doesn't seem to have are new-viewer-friendly vids, so I decided to make one! This vid has clips only from season one, with no major meta-arc or character spoilers, and is meant to be a taste of the show without giving away anything important. (And also a tribute to season one, when everything was new.)

This is intended to be the first in a project to make vids for each season.

Watch on YouTube

Also posted on AO3 and on Tumblr.

Download 160 Mb MP4

New Babylon 5 fic posted on AO3: A Taste for Imperfection
(Set in some nebulous post-canon fixit universe; h/c for a prompt asking for hunger/starvation and comfort food.)

Brief fic notes:

Under here

I wrote most of this on the trip, and the conversation about justice essentially dropped fully formed into my head; then I built the rest around it.

Exchanges which are currently tempting me:

friendshipex just closed nominations and will open signups in a few days. As the name says, this is an exchange for friendships.

wingficex is currently in nominations. I did this a few times in the early 2020s and I'm tempted to do it again.

(I had a signup in for Just Married before I left on my trip, but ended up deleting it because I didn't feel like I could rely on being able to write a fic in the allotted time frame, and the sensible thing is probably not to sign up for either of these .... but we'll see.)

... You might enjoy this lovely Facebook video of a Dragon Rapide taking off!

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1588644629535033

(Not sure if it's viewable without being logged in. I think maybe you need to click through a dialogue box and then can see it.)

I've been away for the last week (family wedding followed by some travel around Alaska, mostly without wifi and often without cell service, then had houseguests for a couple of days).

Along the way, I acquired a couple of new-to-me Dick Francis books in a used bookstore and read them!

Slayride - Well, this definitely has one of the All Time Titles. A British investigator of horse racing shenanigans (of course) investigates a jockey's mysterious disappearance in Norway, with lots of beautifully described chilly ambiance. I was thinking about 2/3 of the way through that this one might end up ranking in my top-tier Francis, because it had some absolutely lovely twists and character surprises! And then a total flat pancake of a disappointing ending in which

vague spoilers

the hero sensibly gets the authorities involved and all the interesting and exciting stuff happens off page without him. And most of the promising character relationships start to develop and then just kind of go off a cliff partway through the book and never get any resolution. DICK FRANCIS, WHY.

Hot Money - This was solid fun! Ian is the estranged son of a rich serial philanderer with five ex-wives and nine kids. Ian's dad wants Ian to help him figure out which of the many suspects is trying to kill him for his money (while also ostentatiously blowing as much of his money on frivolous things as possible before the greedy family can get their hands on it). It's essentially a country house murder mystery in which the murder victim has so far managed to dodge all the murder attempts, and I had a great time with it. It genuinely did keep me guessing 'til the end, with some fun and interesting twists along the way. Very solid Dick Francis, may end up a favorite.

(I feel as if I may have read this one before; there's something very faintly familiar about it. But if so, I didn't remember a thing.)

Happy to elaborate with spoilers in the comments if anyone wants more details! My brain is still a bit flat from all the travel and visiting.

I was tagged on Tumblr on a "5 favorite fics you've written" meme and - while I don't do these all that often - decided to do this one and ended up cramming at least 15 in there and could EASILY have done more.

So I figured I'd copy it over here. (On a side note, it turns out that Tumblr's HTML editor generates "clean" HTML; I thought I was going to have to paste into the rich text editor on DW to avoid having to recode all the links, but the results were - urgh - and then I switched the tumblr post into HTML to copy that out, and it worked perfectly.)

( An ever-expanding cornucopia of favorites )

DW really doesn't have the "tag people into a meme" culture of Tumblr and similar sites, but feel free to get it spreading around DW as well if you think it looks fun!

I went through a batch of lingering prompts in my Tumblr inbox (dating back to the start of this year) in late June/early July and got caught up on the backlog.

1. Babylon 5 - Londo/G'Kar sex pollen

Posted on AO3 here (explicit; 3700 wds)

***

2. Biggles - kid!Fritz and touch-starved Erich

( 800 wds under the cut here )

***

3. Murderbot - Gurathin's augments go out while escaping something in the CR

( 1200 wds under the cut here )

***

4. Babylon 5 - Londo having visions of AU realities

( 1300 wds under the cut here )

Okay, ONE more vid.

Avatar the Last Airbender - Dance Mix on AO3

Also posted on Tumblr for the first time ever

This was, for a long time, what I considered the best vid - from a technical, editing perspective - that I've ever made. There are vid notes at the AO3 link in which I talk about the circumstances under which I created it (caregiving for an elderly relative in summer/fall 2010, essentially spending weeks in a bedroom I basically couldn't leave, which gave me basically endless time to take clips from DVDs).

At that time - and up through the mid-2010s - I was making most of my vids using clips from downloaded TV rips, which was perfectly fine for my purposes, but also meant that this, which was entirely made from DVD footage, was much nicer looking that most of what I was making at the time. I also had ample time on this one to match movement of clips/song in a way I didn't normally. I'm still darn proud of it.

Another batch of vids are up at Sholio Vids on AO3!

I finished uploading the rest of Agent Carter.

• Queen of Hearts (Carter/Sousa/Thompson)
• Try Everything (ensemble)

And going all the way back to 2011 (15 years! what!) I got all my White Collar vids up.

• Fire Escape (Peter & Neal)
• Dustland Fairytale (the tale of Kate, Neal, and Adler)
• I Fought the Law (fun with cops & cons)
• Sugar Sugar (Peter/Elizabeth)

I remember that I vidded the White Collar vids in 2011-era iMovie, which only had one vidding track and clips snapped to each other instead of the timeline - so every time you put a new clip on the timeline, it bumped everything else down. I developed a workaround which was to use blank placeholders (I had a simple black image that I would extend to fill the space) that I used to keep everything locked in place, and then dropped new clips at the end of the timeline and carefully resized them to the exact timestamp dimensions of the placeholder, then dropped them into its place.

On the one hand, the quality was generally really good for the era - although it made the working vid files huge by 2011 hard drive standards - see this post here in which I'm noodling on whether to keep them, lol - and there was a noticeable drop in quality when I moved to vidding in Final Cut a couple of years later, since I had to work out settings once again. (I had started out in Premiere, which was much more powerful but also WAY fiddlier, and you had to deal with export settings and codecs, which iMovie mostly handled for you, and then I went back to Final Cut - which basically is next-gen Premiere - and had to deal with export settings and codecs again.) On the other hand, I remember the sheer relief of being able to layer tracks again, or just be able to place clips without everything jumping downstream on me.

The vid archiving project continues!

Two more Agent Carter vids are online at Sholio Vids on AO3:

• Shut Up and Dance (March 2016)
• Night Changes (July 2016)

As well as two vids for the sci-fi show Sanctuary from 2011:

• What About Everything? (Helen Magnus)
• The Bitch is Back (Nikola Tesla)

I wrote two things!

Apologies (Babylon 5, 1900 wds, major character death)
Four scenes from the end.

Spoilery (for canon and fic) notes

My recipient's requests included one for Vir dealing with his grief over Londo. I found myself interested in the idea that you can grieve someone while they're still alive, and knowing what he must have known by the end, he probably did; so this is a series of snapshots set right around Londo's death involving Vir and various other characters.

And a pinch hit:

Free Fall (The Mars House, Gale/January, 8200 wds)
January accidentally hurts Gale, and they both have to deal with the consequences.

Spoilery notes

While signups were ongoing for Whumpex, I was prepared for the possibility that I might end up needing to pick something I didn't normally write in order to match, and I had just recently read this book, so I brainstormed ahead of time just in case. I matched on something else, but this came up for PH and since I already had ideas, I decided to go for it. I definitely did not expect it to come out 8K, but it got a really lovely reception, and the recip seemed to love it!

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Recent Entries

hAPPy exchange

Case Fic and Id Pro Quo (both B5)

Little life things

Lost Horizon - James Hilton

Body parts dice ficlets

A July 2026 retrospective

Dick Francis - In the Frame

Id Pro Quo reveals

New Penric novella: Darksight Dare

Let's play a game

New vid: Babylon 5 Season 1 - Starting Over

Fandom stuff

And for the Biggles fandom (or other aviation buffs)

Reading roundup: two Dick Francis mysteries

Five or possibly 15 or 20 favorite fics

Tumblr promptfic catchup - Biggles, Babylon 5, Murderbot

Avatar Dance Mix, 2026 edition

Onwards with the vidding project

I'm going to be a lot older than 50 when I finish this

Whumpex author reveals