Arctic Light

Look, I made it this week! \o/

Not a fanwork per se, but naye is hosting a lovely conversation about comfort tropes that is highly relevant to my interests. ♥ (I assume it's okay to link to it since it's unlocked? Please let me know if you want the link taken down!)

I also read a wonderful Agent Carter fic this week:

on the home front by oh_simone/chouette
Jack takes Peggy home as his fake girlfriend for Thanksgiving. Funny and sweet and adorable with great OCs, mostly gen with some Peggy/Daniel and hints of pre-OT3.

I haven't been around much lately. November has been a busy month. But I'm feeling happily accomplished; I've finished all my holiday gift-exchange fics and a handful of pending original projects (all I have left now is the story I signed up to write at lostcityfound, which isn't due 'till early January) and I did quite a bit of freelance this month as well (because fanfic, fun as it is, doesn't pay the bills). I'll be heading out of town on Friday, and I'm only working two days this week, so my plans for the week basically involve some semi-leisurely Christmas shopping, putting together my holiday boxes and getting them in the mail, baking stuff, and playing with my shiny new MacBook. *pets it*

A handful of recs and links:

Push Until It Holds by zillah975 (SGA, John/Ronon and mostly-onesided John/Rodney, NC-17, contains BDSM)
This is one of this year's sgabigbang stories (thus, it's long, about 50K words) and it's the current featured discussion story at sga_talk. I absolutely loved this story -- even though I don't really go for romance as a genre, I love how sex and attraction can, in a good author's hands, be used as a way of exploring and developing character and culture, and this story is a fantastic example of that. But aside from that, it's just a fantastic Atlantis story; it's as much of a team story as a slash story, and the character dynamics are well developed over two and a half slightly-AU seasons. I particularly loved the story's development of Satedan culture and Satedan/Earth sexuality, including the characters' own confusion about where they, themselves, fall within their own culture's norms.

Five Women Who Hate Fleur Delacour by snegurochka_lee (Harry Potter, gen)
I very rarely read HP stories anymore, but I came across this one somehow, and it's wonderful -- a really fascinating look at jealousy and isolation and how we see our own flaws reflected in other people; it made me view Fleur as a much more likable and complex character than I ever found her in the books, without whitewashing her faults.

Semi-nonfannish stuff: How Not To Write a Sex Scene - the short list for the winners of this year's Literary Review Bad Sex Awards: goddawful sex scenes from actual, published novels. And they are hilariously horrible.

The fiction research community little_details (to which I am addicted) has a recent, interesting (to me) thread on heterosexual male friendships; the OP asked how to depict close male friendship, and respondents chimed in with their own experiences or good examples of realistic male friendships from movies and TV (of which someone mentioned SGA ... of course!). It may be of interest to those who write such relationships to see real-life guys talking about their own close friendships with other guys. I was also intrigued by the link to this article on pre-modern same-sex romantic friendship and the way that the modern world has drawn a somewhat arbitrary box called "platonic" and plunked all non-sexual relationships into it; it ties into a recent conversation I was having with xparrot in interesting ways.

I thought I had more links, but apparently not ... perhaps I'll be back if I find more.

sga_details_fic is a new challenge/fic community for stories inspired by the little details in the episodes. From the userinfo:

1) Watch an SGA episode (I know, I know, rough assignment but you’ll muddle through somehow).
2) Find some small detail that comes out about a character or the city or anything really.
3) Use that as the inspiration/focal point of a fic.
4) Post that glorious creation here for all to read and enjoy.

Gen or any sort of pairing-fic (het or slash) are accepted, for any episodes up to 5x01 (which is on tonight, so here's hoping lots of people watch it and the ratings go through the roof!).

And, while I'm mentioning comms, once which doesn't seem to get any love is sgahcchallenges. It's a gen-only, h/c challenge community. Generally I've found the challenges over there too restrictive to spark my creativity. (I notice, though, looking at the userinfo now, that they've upped the maximum word count from 4000 words -- which is good! because that was always one of the big things that stopped me from trying to write something for it ... I KNOW I can't stop at 4000.) But I wanted to mention that it exists, anyway, and maybe it just needs an influx of new writers. Or something.

I'm flailing around somewhat at the idea that our Big Bang fic is, well, mostly done -- my part in it basically is done, and suddenly I can start looking at some of the other ideas (original and fanfic) that I've been putting to one side for the last few months. The only other fic commitment that I have right now is my fic for livelongnmarry (which is still going on, by the way!).

Atlantis fandom on Springer

(Note: image intensive; contains reference to the big Season 4 casting spoiler that 99.99% of the fandom already knows -- and complains -- about ... but just in case you've managed to remain unspoiled, I thought I'd better mention it...)

I've been managing to steer cheerfully clear of *most* of the wank, and of course shipping wars are not something that affect me, but there are still times when I kinda want to tell the more stressed-out portions of the fandom to take a giant chill pill. Only I don't think I could manage to be *nearly* this funny about it.

(And the little chibi South Park cast is SO CUTE!)