Fannish miscellany

[sholio]

I'll be traveling this week, but I doubt if it'll make a difference to my online time, because a) I haven't been online that much lately anyway, and b) I'm going with my husband on a business trip to Anchorage, so I'll be spending most of my time in coffee shops with my laptop anyway (and I'm fine with that; mostly I'm just along for the trip and to see family). So I might actually be online more, who knows.

Anyway, I'm currently on the fence about signing up for fkficfest/fkficfest (Forever Knight fic exchange). Signups close May 20. I've never written FK before, and maybe it's just the similarities with Highlander that are making me think about ye olde vampires lately, but ... I'm tempted! Even though I didn't want to get involved in any fic commitments for a while. *muses*

Highlander has a kink meme: hl_kink. Lots of prompts, not many fills so far. (Master list of fills is here.) *pokes flist in that direction ... if that is your cup of tea*

I think it's funny that I'm normally GEN GEN CANONPAIRING GEN GEN in every fandom, especially when I'm first getting into it, but ... not so much with HL, really. I still love the gen too (and perhaps, yes, I still love it the best) but I'm also very interested in seeking out and, more unusually for me, writing a wide variety of pairings. Some of it is just that I've changed a bit over the last few years, become more interested in exploring different pairing options in fic, but it's not just that, because I was all GEN GEN CANONPAIRING GEN CANONPAIRING in A:tLA too. I suppose with HL it has more to do with the nature of canon and the fact that I can so easily, so plausibly, see the characters trying on different sexual roles with each other -- actually, given their long lives and the fluidity of their approach to life in canon, I think it's actually harder for me to believe that they wouldn't have that kind of fluidity and ambiguity in their personal relationships as well. (I love Duncan/Amanda, for example, and it's totally canon, but I can't buy them settling down with a white picket fence and being exclusive and happy with each other. That's just not what their relationship is all about. And it's one of the reasons I love it so much.)

Anyway! Off to finish writing up instructions for the petsitter and washing dishes, and then time to hit the road. Why do I always feel compelled to clean the house right before I leave? I'm embarrassed for the housesitter to see my house this way, so I always go on a mad cleaning spree right before leaving; I think it's the cleanest the house ever gets ...

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Comments

[leesa_perrie]

Off to finish writing up instructions for the petsitter

You should enjoy this petsitter advice for a man with six cats, then!!!

(He also has one about how to medicate a cat for housesitter too!)

[sholio]

Hee! :D

Heh, my sister actually found the PERFECT way to medicate a stranger's cat while she was petsitting for a diabetic and extremely violent cat: she bought a pair of elbow-length leather welding gloves. She said it worked great -- as long as she could catch the cat in the first place, there wasn't a thing it could do to stop her at that point.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Hee, I always houseclean before trips myself - not always when there's going to be a sitter, even, I just like coming home to a clean house. But a sitter coming over does make me step up (I also clean like mad before we get any guests, especially if it's their first time over...)

Hmmm, yeah, that might be why I never got into writing fic for HL myself - because I don't have an OTP for it, really. There are so many relationships and they are all in flux. And yet there's permanence - as long as they're alive Duncan and Amanda will love each other, and I think Methos, too (with either or both of them) - but not always together, and not exclusively, because that's not how they work.

[sholio]

HL is a bit anomalous for me as a primary fandom because I don't seem to have a touchstone relationship, which I always, always do with shows that I get into in that really intense fannish way. Or at least I used to. I think over the last 5 years or so, I've moved away from fanning on a specific character relationship and towards fanning on whole groups of characters (the SGA team, the A:tLA kids), and I think HL just came along at the right time to be perfect for the kind of thing I apparently gravitate towards right now: the characters' constant state of relationship flux, and, yet, the underlying rock-solid love and concern for each other works REALLY WELL for me right now, especially after spending several years in a fandom (SGA) where the character relationships have changed little since the first season except in depth. The last year or two that I was really into SGA, most of what I wanted to write were stories that shook up the status quo, usually in very depressing ways, and I think HL is giving me what I was actually craving -- a fandom where relationships change and develop over time in fairly major ways. But without going down the twin paths of suck and fail that most of the OTHER relationships-in-flux shows I've watched lately have been doing...

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

a fandom where relationships change and develop over time in fairly major ways. But without going down the twin paths of suck and fail that most of the OTHER relationships-in-flux shows I've watched lately have been doing...

Mmmm, yeah, that is something HL does uniquely well! At least in Western shows; anime/manga often has evolving relationships, and it's one of the things I'm enjoying now that I'm back into it, even if it doesn't inspire me to fic or fan in the same way. But HL does have a great balance, without falling into soap opera bathos and without forgetting the love (and I like, too, that HL's romance isn't will-they-or-won't-they UST-driven, or raging with jealousy and broken promises; I love that Duncan and Amanda and Methos are BFFs as much as lovers...)

[sholio]

and I like, too, that HL's romance isn't will-they-or-won't-they UST-driven, or raging with jealousy and broken promises; I love that Duncan and Amanda and Methos are BFFs as much as lovers...

*nodnod* I'm actually amazed at how squarely HL managed to hit some pretty specific buttons of mine for relationships while avoiding my very closely related "do not wants". I loathe jealousy/cheating plotlines, but I have a longstanding love for couples who are clearly in love while absolutely not following the picket-fence-and-kids trajectory, or even conforming to traditional ideas of marriage and relationships, such as "you must live in the same country with your significant other" or whatnot *g*. Basically I just love relationships that are all about people finding their own kind of happiness without being too concerned about what society says they're supposed to be doing, and relationships (romantic, platonic, or some combination of the two) that are sort of messy, variable and hard to quantify -- that don't quite fit into tidy little boxes. HL was actually better at this than nearly any other Western show I can think of -- most of the other examples that come to mind are either books or anime/manga.